Good House of the Week: Montana (Patreon)

This week's house is actually in the adjacent county (but not too far from this week's McMansion). It demonstrates that a good house can be a reasonable, everyday house - including an attached garage. 

While I may not be particularly enthusiastic about the garage door choice, I do believe the garage is well-integrated into this 2017 house. First off, there is great horizontal rhythm connecting the garage mass to the rest of the house. This is done via the lines of the siding, the fact that the garage door is framed in the same way as the windows (plus the top of the garage door is LEVEL with the window headers and the front door), and through the simple roofline, which integrates the house with the garage, through an unfussy cross gable while the front-facing garage gable and the larger of the two cascading gables are the same size and pitch. 

Also, even though this house uses all-new materials, it avoids looking cheap. First, the fiber cement shingles are not an unnatural color, and they look good with the stone veneer which, thankfully, does not dominate the facade. Second, the muntinless windows are nice because muntins would definitely clutter such small masses (especially here, as there are two patterned cladding materials already). Third, the craftsman stylings are well done - the cascading gables have a definitive bungalow look, and the brackets under the eaves are neither too many nor too ornate. Finally, the splashes of natural wood - the columns of the portico and the lovely front door, give the house a sense of natural sturdiness it may not otherwise have if those two elements were made with any other material. 

Link to listing.