City villa or classic gabled roof house? Advantages? Costs?

Hello everyone,

I am currently going around in circles with my thoughts.
My dream has always been a classic gable roof house with 1.5 stories. However, I also find a [Stadtvilla] with two full stories quite stylish. We already have a plot of land, and according to the development plan, we can realize both because the regulations are very generous.

As I said, my dream has always been a classic house with a gable roof. I just find it visually super beautiful, and it feels very cozy and conveys a sense of security to me. The disadvantages for me would be that I don’t want too many sloping ceilings and want a lot of daylight upstairs. So we would definitely install many or large dormers. I once lived in an attic apartment that only had one straight window; everything else were skylights, which I found terrible! Apart from the fact that you couldn’t really look outside anywhere, I also don’t like the noise level when it rains.

I also like a [Stadtvilla], they are very trendy at the moment, and usually very chic and stylish. The advantage here would be, of course, that the upper floor would be a full story and therefore only have straight walls and normal windows. But somehow, I also find it a bit cold and uncomfortable. We wouldn’t convert the roof but would put a [Zeltdach] on top. A [Stadtvilla] would probably fit better into the surroundings since on the right and left of the plot stand two 2.5-story apartment buildings.

Somehow, there are more arguments for a [Stadtvilla], right? But then there’s still my dream and gut feeling...
Maybe someone can also tell me something about the cost differences between the two house types with roughly the same living space (as said, with the gable roof there would definitely be many large dormers added)?

I hope you could follow me and I look forward to a few impulses, tips, and experiences that might help me.

I would like to upload a picture of the property, but when I click on [Datei hochladen], nothing happens... What am I doing wrong?

What advice can one give you there? You have to decide for yourself if both are possible. You've already described the objective advantages/disadvantages.

The additional dormers on the classic gabled roof house of course come at an extra cost, how much, perhaps an expert here can tell you. Therefore, the 1.5-story house with the same living space, and if the "Stadtvilla" manages without additional corners/bays..., would probably be somewhat more expensive. I can only tell you how we decided: We chose the classic gabled roof house because we simply like it much better and, as you nicely said, find it "cozier." But this is just a personal, subjective view. We briefly considered the "Stadtvilla" due to the advantages you mentioned, but discarded the idea fairly quickly.

The question is also what "a lot of daylight" means to you. You can also install floor-to-ceiling windows on the gable sides, so you might not even need dormers? We ourselves have a dormer because on the gable sides there should be normal windows and the children should each still have a floor-to-ceiling window so that at 2 and 1 years old they can look outside. And it breaks up the boxy shape of the "house" (whether classic or Stadtvilla) a bit. Personally, I don’t need much daylight in the bedroom and bathroom; a normal window is perfectly sufficient for me. But everyone has to decide that for themselves.

I personally find gable roofs more beautiful and cozy. And there are so many variations. We have a classic gable roof house, but with a knee wall of 1.50 (inside approx. 1.60 from finished floor level) and a roof pitch of 42 degrees. This way we already have almost standing height under the knee wall and hardly any sloping roof. Additionally, there is still enough space in the attic to, for example, create a playroom.

We decided on a town villa and are glad about it.

We visited several model houses and always found the upper floor in the one-and-a-half-storey houses very cramped. Due to floor-to-ceiling windows on the gable sides, sloping ceilings, and doors, usually three sides of a room were unusable for placing a larger wardrobe. In one model house, a children's room was so unusable that the poor child permanently had to sleep in a 1.40m children's bed because there was no free wall for a normal bed. The beds in the bedrooms were always under the sloping roof, and the bedroom wardrobes could often only be opened because they fortunately had sliding doors. I suspect this put us off so much that a gable roof was quickly ruled out for us.

Of course, you can create space on the upper floor by investing additional capital in high knee walls, large dormers, or by enlarging the house. However, the large dormers and the high knee walls work against the "coziness." And the option of enlarging the upper floor also affects the ground floor, where I might not even need the extra space.

Therefore, besides aesthetic preferences, one should also consider on which floor certain spaces are to be realized. If you need a guest room or office on the ground floor, a one-and-a-half-storey house is certainly more attractive. If you perhaps need three children's rooms and a bedroom on the upper floor, the town villa would be preferable. For example, with the two full storeys on the upper floor, we were able to realize a utility room for the washing machine, dryer, and storage space. At the same time, we could keep the footprint of our house smaller than with a one-and-a-half-storey house and thus have more space on the rest of the property.

Hello Panama17,

just because city villas are trendy at the moment, I wouldn’t build one if you dream of something else.

For example, we are building a "classic" 1.5-story gable roof house. However, with a knee wall of 140 cm and a third gable facing south.

By using floor-to-ceiling windows and our third gable, we don’t need a single roof window and still exceed the minimum daylight factor by far.

We don’t want to miss the sloping ceilings, even though we currently still live in our attic apartment.

As you say, it’s simply much cozier for us with a few, unobtrusive, slopes in the attic.

Have you ever been to a large model home exhibition? There you can get a good impression of what is possible with sloping ceilings.

Regards,

Dirk