Make the roof visible, and bring its eaves down low enough, and far enough out, that the building reads as a shelter from the street and the garden.
The pattern argues that people feel sheltered by a roof they can see and almost touch, and that a flat roof hidden behind a parapet gives no such feeling. The Prairie house, the Arts and Crafts cottage and many vernacular houses bring the eaves down to the height of the first floor and let them project well beyond the walls, which also shades the walls and throws rain clear of them.
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
On an equator-facing window, make the overhang deep enough to shade the whole window from the high noon sun of summer, and no deeper, so that the low winter sun passes beneath it into the room.
noon sun altitude = 90° − latitude ± 23.44° · overhang D = window height ⁄ tan(summer altitude)
Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.
Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.
Build a deep porch, eight or nine feet, usually recessed under the main roof, on sturdy posts or piers, big enough to sit and eat in: in summer it is the living room of the house.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The sheltering roof”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/sheltering-roof. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.