Recently, I was writing a story in which someone had a vision of a house. I had a really clear idea of what I wanted the building to look like; very much like the house in the picture above. I reckoned that it should be possible to do better for a description than “the windows on the top floor had pointy bits going up into the roof”.
Are they gable windows? A gable is the triangle-y part on the end of a ridged roof, but does it apply here as well? Asking around, no one understood what I meant by “gable window”.
A cursory search suggested that maybe what I wanted was a “dormer window”. In which case I felt it was time for a quick redesign of the house in the story. I dislike the word dormer; I associate it with bugalows, and with sad towns that have become nothing more than London commuter overspill.
I took myself off to consult Rice’s Architectural Primer, which is an absolute delight of a book. The cover blurb promises “an indispensable guide to the vocabulary and grammar of British buildings”; the pages are packed with lovely illustrations and the most amazingly obscure words. Twenty minutes later I still had no idea what the windows were called, but was quite taken with vermiculated rustication, and had learned the difference between torus and scotia.
After some more browsing, I concluded:
A dormer window is set upright on a sloping roof, so these are not dormer windows.
These are probably just windows, with gables above them.
The above is more or less useless if no one else understands what I mean, and frankly “pointy bits going up into the roof” may well paint a better picture.
Ah, well. Back to the writing!
Many thanks to Denise for sending me a photo of her house to demonstrate the pointy bits.
