The Farmhouse

How did the house design evolve?  It probably started nearly 40 years ago as I drove around Michigan and found my eye attracted by a certain kind of farmhouse — a two-story box with a shed roof, sometimes with a one- or two-story wing thrown off to one side or the other, clad in brick or clapboard.  I found the simplicity of the lines pleasing, even restful.  Farmhouses come in lots of styles, of course.  I'm not sure what style category this kind of structure fits into.  Maybe it's called Plain Old Farmhouse!  The photo will give you some idea of what I mean by this.

When I tried to convey to Bob what the house ought to look like, I asked for an interpretation (not a reproduction) of a Plain Old Michigan Farmhouse.  Simple.  Straight-forward.  A minimum of busyness.  A lot of that simplicity comes from the roof.  As I watched houses being built near my several churches, often in a style I have come to call Faux Chateaux, I was amazed by the complexity of the roofs, and especially by the proliferation of valleys.  That caught my attention because one lesson I have learned through 26 years of taking care of church buildings is: "Valleys always leak."  Now, I realize that roofs can leak for other reasons, e.g., flashing around the chimney, a hole caused by a falling meteorite, etc.  But I really do have a deeply ingrained anti-valley bias.  For that reason I decided to avoid valleys at all costs, and to have — for the most part, at least — simple shed roofs.