Proportion: why some houses just look right

Walk down almost any street in Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills and you can pick out the houses that look right. Few people could say why. Size has little to do with it, and neither does cost. A modest colonial can look settled and graceful, while a much larger and more expensive house can look awkward from every angle. The difference, nearly every time, is proportion.

What is proportion, and how is it different from scale?

Proportion is about relationships: how tall a window is compared with its width, how much wall sits between windows, how deep the eave is relative to the wall below it. Scale is related but different. It describes how the parts of a house relate to a person standing beside them. A large house can feel intimate when its entry and details are sized to people, and a small house can feel grand. Good houses get both right. When either is off, people sense it long before they can name it.

Where the conventions come from

Builders have been refining these relationships for centuries. Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, published in 1570, set the sizes of rooms by harmonic proportion, so that each room related to the ones beside it. English translations in the 1700s carried his ideas through Britain and on to colonial America. Much of what reads as traditional in our area, including the Georgian and colonial revival houses built here in the 1920s and 1930s, descends from that line.

The conventions that came down to us are practical rather than mystical. Marianne Cusato’s Get Your House Right, written with the proportion specialist Richard Sammons, is a modern catalog of them, drawn side by side as what to use and what to avoid, from eaves and dormers to door surrounds and columns.

Getting the window line right

Windows do more than any other element to make or break a facade. The classical designer Christine Franck summarizes the long-tested guidelines well. On a symmetrical house, windows stack directly above one another and fall into an odd number of bays, so a door or window sits on the center line. Spacing between them is usually between one and one and a half window widths, so the wall neither crowds the windows nor overwhelms them. Window heads align across each floor, windows stay clear of corners and of horizontal lines such as cornices, and upper-floor windows are often slightly smaller than those below, which gives the house a sense of lift.

The windows themselves matter as much as their placement. Historic sashes usually have panes taller than they are wide, and many stock replacement windows reverse that, which is one reason a renovated older house can suddenly look wrong. Fine Homebuilding notes that colonial panes were often about 8 to 9 inches wide and 10 to 12 inches tall, and that matching the depth and profile of the original muntins matters as much as matching the pattern.

Proportion is decided in the drawings and protected in the field, one window, eave and column at a time.

Not every good house is symmetrical

Tudor, shingle and arts-and-crafts houses are often deliberately asymmetrical, and they are no less carefully proportioned for it. The discipline simply moves. Each mass of the house gets its own regular rhythm, gable walls carry smaller and more distinctive windows, and the main roof clearly leads while wings and dormers defer to it.

The same is true of modern houses. A flat-roofed house with long runs of glass depends just as much on the balance of solid and open, the height of the roofline against the length of the house, and openings that line up with one another. The vocabulary changes. The attention does not.

What about the golden ratio?

No discussion of proportion gets far without the golden ratio, the number of roughly 1.618 said to underlie the Parthenon and much of great design. The claim does not hold up well. Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin has traced it to a nineteenth-century misattribution, studies asking people to choose a favorite rectangle have not found a consistent preference for it, and working architects rarely design by it. Good proportion comes less from a single number than from tested conventions applied with judgment to a particular house.

Proportion is not decoration added at the end. It is what lets a house look as though it could not have been drawn any other way.

Further reading: Christine G. H. Franck, Avoiding Fenestration Fiascos; Fine Homebuilding, Stylish, Character-Defining Windows and a review of Get Your House Right; Fairfax & Sammons, Get Your House Right; Encyclopedia.com, Andrea Palladio; Fast Company, The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth; Houzz, Architect’s Toolbox: Scale and Proportion.

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