House Builder styles: barns, log cabins, A-frames, mansions and townhouse rows

More than one kind of house

Generators → House Builder used to draw one family of house in many shapes. It now draws eight styles: classic, minimalist, barn, log cabin, farmhouse, chalet, Mediterranean and A-frame. It also builds mansions and rows of townhouses. Pick a style, or leave it on mixed and every click deals one.

A style is more than a paint job. Each one changes how the house is built.

Barn

Barn houses get an extruded gable roof, a single long roof running the length of the house, in corrugated sheet with ridge caps. Some have their gable ends fully glazed, with curtain walls under the glass, and half get skylights over the top storey's windows.

Log cabin

Cabin walls are real logs, built as geometry. Logs on walls that meet at a corner are offset by half a log, so the ends interlock and run past the corner the way a notched cabin does. The logs carry on up the gables and show on the inside walls too. Cabins are one storey, on a stone plinth, with a stone chimney.

Farmhouse

Half the farmhouses get a porch along the whole front or wrapping round a corner, on square posts that flank the front door, with a dormer in the middle of the roof above it.

Minimalist

Flat roofs with parapets, grey stone feature walls, box or cylinder columns, and no window dressing. Door frames match the windows. The flat roofs get roof plant too: AC units, vents, air handlers and aerials.

A-frame

An A-frame is one storey, its roof coming all the way down to the ground, with glazed ends. Variants add lower wings in an L, T or U. The floor is raised, so doors open onto landings and steps. Build Interior cuts a small porch through the slope wherever a door would otherwise open straight into the roof.

Mansions

Mansions can be built round a court. They come in white, off-white or magnolia, with wide doors and skylights on their big roofs.

Townhouses

Set the size to townhouse and you get a row of one to four houses. Each is a separate building with its own walls and roof. The fronts and backs step in and out, the heights alternate, and no two are the same width. A row is either minimalist or classic: brick, brownstone or limestone houses with proper mouldings. Each house gets its own interior, laid out for its own width.

Smaller things that came with them

• Mirror flips a whole house left to right or front to back, every floor at once, and Build Interior still fits the result.
• The Steps tool draws a single flight of 2 to 9 steps on 150 mm risers. House Builder uses it at every raised door, and deck rails open where the steps go down.
• Glazing bars keep their panes roughly square, never more than two by two.
• Cladding runs right up to the window frames, and door leaves match their frames.

Every house is still an ordinary zdraw scene, so anything the generator did can be changed with the normal tools. Try it from the editor under Generators.