I have been working a bit on an American themed world and had some ideas for houses. I went into a world (St. Claire) to build some houses. Thankfully, it has a large empty district on the edge of town. I have been building house-after-house for the past couple of days now to fill in this district (I also plan to replace 3 pre-built lots in the district). Here is the results so far. There are a LOT of images (at least one exterior screenshot and one image of the layout of each floor, and most have a few interior shots). Each property is under it's own spoiler.

District from Map View:
The darker-roofed houses (not including the ones around the bridge) are the ones I made.




I have made an edit so that within the section for each house (most of them) is an image of the floor plan. You can click on it to go to the site the plan is on. The pages have an exterior render (or actual photo) and sometimes some cross section renders and interior views. There are two houses which I do not have the floor plans for. One of them is based on a house I used to live in and have the plans memorized, the other is roughly based on other houses in the same district as the one I lived in and is a mix of elements from several of them.

















All of these houses are based on real-life floor plans and are intended as a typical American suburban sprawling neighborhood in or near a large city.

How do they look?

I love your kitchens! Very nice! You are doing a great job on these houses.

Now for the constructive criticism
I realize your creations are a work in progress.

1 Brighton Road - I don't care for all the different brick colors on the exterior.
3 Brighton Road - Would raise the roof to hide the window coming through and would get rid of wall (see screen below.)
3 Tussock Street - I feel the gray brick on the front "columns" doesn't add to the curb appeal of the house.
5 Tussock Street - Once again, brick on brick is not appealing unless it matches a bit better.
2 Coopers Close - Not sure what is going on with the arch on the front porch. I'd stick with the same windows all around, the ones to the side of that arch don't look right, sorry.

I think once you add some landscaping and play with your color schemes you will be very pleased with your work! Also adding some window shutters and smaller vents or windows where the walls are empty-ish makes a huge difference. Adding quoining (trim on the edges) on some areas help break up the space also.

Shutters: http://modthesims.info/d/527775/sep...ght-pieces.html
Exterior doodads: https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...und/id/1050824/
https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...top/id/1050834/

Some nice brick patterns: https://www.thesimsresource.com/art...work/id/887972/
https://www.thesimsresource.com/art...rick/id/885379/
https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...t_2/id/1057112/
https://www.thesimsresource.com/art...n75/id/1098512/

My favorite house is 2 Tussock Street, really, really nice!

The brick colors are actually rock and brick. The colors themselves are not final, but the materials are basically what they are on the real houses they are based on.
I still need to go through and change some of the colors to make them flow a bit better..

On 3 Brighton Road, no matter how much I raise the roof, that window will poke through a little (the roof pivots around the point where it meets the wall, so the roof surface at that point where the window pokes through will always be at that point). I might be able to use CASt to try to get it to blend better. I will have to do some experimenting.
As for the strange wall at the front of the garage, the real house has a strange wall there, so I tried to replicate it. Do you have any suggestions for that, or would it be best to just remove it?
Here is the exterior render of the house it is based on:


The columns on 3 Tussock Street are another attempt at replication. The windows on those walls are wall-to-wall, but the real house has some brickwork around them. This one took a long time to figure out, and the results are a bit odd. I am open to suggestions on replacing that as well.
Here is the exterior of real house:


The arch on 2 Cooper's Close my attempt to tie in the raised roof there. The real house simply has a pillar (which I could not replicate) and windows around and above the front door, similar to the windows to the right of the arch. The room behind those windows is an office/library from with 12' ceilings as opposed to the 9' ceilings of the rest of the house (in Sims, that's more like a 16' ceiling compared to the 12' ceilings of the rest of the house).
The exterior of that one:


Looking back at the exterior of this one (for 2 Cooper's Close), I think there is a floor-to-ceiling variant of that window for the library, which will bring the bottom of that window down to the same height as the rest of the windows, hopefully making it fit better.

I'm going to go hunt down the floor plans I used, and edit the original post to show the original plan. I still have most of them open (all the green tabs are to the site where most of the plans are, and the light blue one on the left between all the green and Google is the 10,000 square foot house)


[EDIT]
This might look better

Oh well, I'm making animations at the moment, and I'm bored. So here comes .

I'm not from the us. I build houses with a Scandinavian point of view. You seem to have a good eye. I don't really think you should make your houses so close to the original. You're making houses for a game, and frankly most of the floorplans on such sites are made to be changed for a family, and they're not that great. You can make it a challenge to make houses better than the original.

There are a few things in general I would point out. I don't like diagonal walls. I know the US use a lot of them, but often they are a pain to furnish. Diagonal furnishings doesn't excist more or less. In the games they also frequently leave unused spaces in the corners. Unused space is something there seem to be some of in your houses. I understand you want to replicate the original floorplan, but please don't. I'm a minimalist preoccupied with functionality. If it has no function, leave it out.

Also your rooms are very big. I know you like them big in the us, but sometimes it just makes them feel empty. You can't just take a floorplan and replicate it meter by meter in the game. It's better to calculate the needed space for a type or furniture. Lets say a kitchen counter needs one tile, and then plan the size of the room from that.

Lets go a bit more in detail then, since you seem to be good already, I'm going to be picky. It's your houses, you do as you please with my advice:
1 Brighton Road:
- As already mentioned ... the wallpaper. I would use some stone and some wood. Try to use your skills as a builder to find something more suitable.
- The windows on the facade below the roof. My OCD seems to think they are not symmetrical. I'm not always building symmetrical, but these kind of houses looks off without it.
- The floordividers in TS3 can be recolored, it seems to me like you haven't touch them.
- I think this house could do well with an hallway. The main room seems a bit big to me. You will also have more room upstairs that way. Where I come from we always have hallways, but then the weather is always crap as well so perhaps we need it more than you.
- On the upper floor you have one of those diagonal walls in the hallway again. To me it looks like it's making a toilet even smaller than it already is. I would either ditch that room or actually make it a room. Teeny tiny rooms on a RL floorplan has no use in game, just ditch them.

3 Brighton Road:
- The roof angle gives me a headache. Will it run more smoothly with the window if you lower the pitch? If you have such problems go through your catalogue in game and decorate the house with something that covers up the ugly duckling.
- Try to make the windows look like they match ... or don't. Either way, one or the other. It's also a delicate balance to fusion styles if you're not used to it. The problem with EA windows is they are not white when they are white, very often.
- Your diagonal kitchen wall I'm sure looked great to the architect on paper and then all his/her clients comes along and wants it to go away. Since the kitchen is butting up against the diagonal wall, it just seems like a nuisance.
- In the hallway you have another set of diagonal walls. One of them has a function in letting the sims enter the room in a diagonal way rather than straight. That's fine, but then you have an empty spot. I would just drag it straight on the right side of the hallway. That means you get an asymmetrical solution in that hallway, which I think is perfectly fine.
- The same diagonal solution to the bedrooms gives you another odd wall in the bathroom though, and what do you plan to do with that? I mean one diagonal wall tile in the bathroom is perfectly fine, but can the sims use that room for anything?

3 Tussock Street:
- This house isn't worth struggling with in my opinion. Find something more suitable.

5 Tussock Street:
- It might be big, but I like big buildings. You leave a lot of empty space. Try to give the house more suitable smaller areas, even in an open plan layout.
- I'm sure there is a rule against 2 types of brick/stone on the same building. Make it paint or wood or whatever
- ... and I mean, the amount of garages? Seriously. I know you love your cars, but 5 doors?

6 Tussock Street:
- The parents bedroom is too big. If you have a bed with a hole row of tiles unused on one side, the room is too big. On the bathroom side of the room it can be useful to have extra room because of all the doors, but not on the other side in my opinion.

8 Tussock Street:
- I don't really like hallways either, and on the left side, you have 2 beside each other.
- Another thing that gives me a headache are your tiny windows, but we have light only a couple of hours a day around xmas ...
- The high pitched roofs are probably the natural thing for you, but roofs that are higher than the house itself looks a bit of for me.

2 Cooper's Close:
- oh yes, diagonal walls ... moving on
- In a bathroom if you use the combo bathtub/showers, I often have just one wall beside them. That leaves me one wall I can decorate, and no diagonals.

These are all my views on the subject, You do as you please. If you want to know what I make, click on my name or on my site address below.

Then I' going to through you a bone. I think you should look at color coordinating your houses and you can do that with the cast tool in TS3. You can try colormind if you like. There are others. You can pick out the 6 digit hex code from TS3 and select a color that fits, and paste it into cast on any furniture in the room. It will make your houses look professional

I like to take floor plans and replicate them as perfectly as possible. This alone is a challenge because real life does not work on a 1x1 meter grid system like the Sims does! Once the house is built, I then turn it into a bit of a different challenge of reworking parts of it to make it better, similar to renovating a house after you move in. There were several parts of these houses where I did have to do my own calculating based on the items that would go in them and resize them accordingly. Of coarse, in doing this, I then had to resize the entire house because adding space to one room would take away from another, which would then domino-effect through the entire house.
The thing with diagonal walls is that they add variety and shape to an otherwise plain rectangle of a room. They are a bit hard to furnish, but homeowners usually prefer the harder-to-work-with diagonals as making your furniture layout work with it is very rewarding. As such, diagonal walls do tend to make a house either more valuable or easier to sell. People like unique.
Being minimalist is great when it comes to the cost of something (one product has more functionality while the other looks better, but the fancier looking product costs more). When it comes to housing, as someone who has been designing these things since 5 years old, minimalism does not go over well. These are buildings people will live their entire lives in, so they need to have some comfort and pleasure out of it. As for the wasted space, those are either used as closets, support structures, or utility space (wiring, ducts, pipes, etc). Sure these rooms and spaces are not useful to a Sim, but they are realistic. As a simulation game, lack of realism in buildings is something I can not stand (and The Sims games are full of it).


The windows above the front porch are indeed not centered with the tip of the roof above. This is intentional. They are lined up with the windows of the room below. This is done for structural reasons (the support frame can go around both windows all the way up the house).

The main room is supposed to be large. As you said, the US likes large rooms.
As for the "floordividers", do you mean the little brick "fence" along the front of the house? I haven't recolored it yet. I plan to when I go back through and do landscaping.


The small room in the bathroom is a closet. Closets are not exactly "useful" for Sims, but they are realistic, so I add them anyway. Minimalism does not fly with me when it comes to housing. A pure minimalist house is awful, tiny, and uncomfortable. Not a good way to live.
The diagonals at the end of the hallway are to make it so that the walls flow better together with the door into the bedroom. The little "wasted space" room between the hall and fireplace a good spot for wiring conduits and ducts to be run through.
The roof line is a bit steep. It is like that for the windows of the living room. I do have a few different slopes of those windows available, so I can try out a few different pitches.


What do you mean? I find the house itself quite suitable for the lot.


This house is actually 2 houses put under one roof by the (originally 6) 5-car garage and a large indoor pool area. It is a 2 bed 2.5 bath guest house with it's own 2-car garage connected to a 4 bed 4.5 bath main house with a 3 car garage. This house has had many changes from the original plan, as the original house was too large to fit on the lot.
In the United States, no such brick rule exists. In fact, adding a variety of brick and stone adds to curb appeal here. We don't like wooden houses in the city, so wood is out of the question. Siding is quite common, but it does not look right on this house.


Again, we don't like claustrophobic small spaces. We get enough of that with the hallways.


The hallway between the two bedrooms is there to give a bit more privacy in that section of the house. If you are in one of the bedrooms and need to go to the bathroom, but don't want to get involved with anything else going on (parents have friends over and you don't like them, for example), then you have that hallway so that you never enter into the main room.


Yes, diagonal walls! Don't worry, I don't like them either. They are a pain to work with, but they can provide some interesting and unique results.


Thank you for pointing out the color thing. I might look into that!

I appreciate your feedback. Keep in mind, though, that styles are completely different in the US than in Scandinavia. Building rectangle wood and stone houses would look like a hunting camp in the woods in the United States, which do NOT belong in the middle of a city.

I think what is throwing off the porch on 2Coopers is that you have an arch. Remove the arch and see how it looks. Perhaps a column would fit under the roof?

The curved fence that is really a wall can be achieved with cheats. It has an illusion of being away from the wall of the garage but it's not. I'll find a tutorial for you if you wish. I've dabbled only briefly with the CFE cheat. But here is a house NOT created by me that has a curved wall/fence. (see below)

And the other house, I'm going into my game and I'm going to replicate that look for you...it's really driving me crazy!

Me, personally, I love to replicate houses. I try to get them exactly as I see them. For me it's a challenge and tremendously rewarding and FUN! There are some things that just can't be replicated in the sims. I gave up on trying to make the little (attic, I suppose) windows on the top of the house below. I just couldn't make it work.

First screen NOT by me, I forgot the creator but will get the name in a bit.

Last two are my replication of the 2nd screen and my vision of what the back would look like. (Sorry I can't help myself for showing off )

A column will not fit under the roof on 2 Cooper's Close. The roof there is actually 1.25 floors above the slab. Columns are only 1 or 2 floors tall, not in between. What I did there was actually place a modded column (the arch) and build a 0.25 tall wall above it.

I used an object in my game to raise a column to fit. Gonna go look at it...

OH!
I feel dumb!
I think you mean the OMSP objects which you can raise by the centimeter to the perfect height. I could place a column on the ground, then place another on the OMSP, then raise it a bit and place it in the same place as the first column...

[EDIT]

HA! Got it!



Is this what you meant?

[EDIT 2]

I managed to get the roof on the house next door changed. The pitch was 45 degrees, but it is now 37 degrees:


Not sure what I did here, but I noticed the window now no longer pokes through. It might have been the change of pitch, but not sure. I just noticed it is fixed, but not sure how long it has been fixed.

You got it!
For my situation I used this object https://www.thesimsresource.com/art...ock/id/1151109/
and it worked out for me. Funny all the quirky little things in this game!
(my last column is poking through the roof a bit, see we can find things we might not normally notice)

Those work quite well for that building with those columns. I might make use of that with my Rabbit Hole Replacement project, especially for the City Hall lots. Thank you for sharing that!

I made a smaller house of a similar, but a bit different style. It is a narrow house on the edge of the district (there are 2 narrow lots which I originally had no intention of building, but came across a plan that would work perfectly on such a lot)

You are welcome.
That is Daffodil House from Champs Le Sims, remodeled and I put all my filler rabbit holes there, city hall, business, arboretum, the vault thingy and made a place to eat at the end.

What size lot are you using for 3 Tussock Street? I really like that house and I'm gonna figure it out.

3 Tussock is a 40x30 lot. Front door is facing the 30 side, garage doors facing the 40 side. Thank you. I like it, too. It's an odd house, but the overall shape of the exterior flows really well to me.

Ok...I see it now. It's a corner lot, doh.
Gonna see what I can do with the front part of the building /wink!
(I'm sorry, but I feel challenged, in more ways than one!)

Indeed on a conrer


The garages have been bothering me. I have tried to ignore it, but I can't.

The garage doors I am using are part of a set I found while searching for doors and windows (I'll see if I can go find it again). The set includes several doors based on the Closure Garage Door from base game, but featuring different amounts of panels and windows and each having a 4-tile and a 3-tile variant (I usually use the 3-tile, as they are more realistic).
This house has 3 1-car doors and a hinge door. This particular 3-tile garage door has this glitch where it extends the wall one tile to it's right (so you have to separate them, which works fine for this house), which covers half of the hinged door. The hinged door is as far to the right as it can go because the wall lowers height down to the slab right here (the slab just to the right is under the master bath). Due to all of this, the hinged door is half covered by the wall on the left and the top-right corner has some wall.

At this point, I think I am going to replace the garage doors with the windowless variant (which does not have this glitch) and just hope I can continue to ignore the tiny corner wall over the door. It's sad because I really like the glass on the garage doors.

Well, this is as good as I could get it for now....just too tired. (Ugh, Monday soon, blarg)
Too much CAS and game is acting up so not so great of screenshots. It was fun to try and make that house but there is only so much you can do with what you have to work with.
Got rid of the utility room and made it an entry/sitting area.
Good Night.

Interesting. What pillar are those on the fronts? And what is that roof truss?

Where do you plan to put the utility room?
I don't know if you have Ambitions EP or not. One thing that upset a lot of people about it was the addition of laundry. I love this feature. It allows you to choose not to deal with it (so you get piles of clothing everywhere) or to work with it. It gives a reason for laundry and utility rooms. These are rooms left unthought of in Sims games. It is always interesting building a house with them in mind.

Also, if you are interested, I can get my used custom content in that house listed and send you the lot (might be easier to edit a prebuilt version rather than trying to build your own from scratch?)
Alternatively, I can save a copy of and scrap the interior, leaving only a shell (only the doors, windows, and roof texture are modded) so you can modify it as you wish.
I can then place the original copy back via Edit Town.

That is the Aspen Column from in game (pretty sure) but I found an add-on build set that matches it. https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...ms3/id/1219868/ Might be helpful.
The roof decor is from this set - https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...set/id/1214354/

I thought the laundry room could go in the 3 car garage ( a bit much for my taste, I normally don't build garages as I find it a waste of space ). I also skip closets and try to get bathrooms as small as possible or tuck them into little areas generally near the bedroom or towards the way out of the house.

I find it very hard to follow real life floor plans, I just make it how I think it should go, regarding sims. I place rooms in a flowing way so they can go from one task to the next. Sleep, pee, eat then go to work and do it in reverse when they get home. Sounds boring, I know.

I don't usually build large houses, I just wanted to see if I could get it to look somewhat like the original and I'll give myself a pat on the back. I think it looks quite nice. The columns gave me trouble, the roof gave me trouble and the flower planters gave me trouble. Of course the windows & door is what I had to work with, I'm not going to download more stuff for one house although I'm thinking about getting more exterior window treatments (the arch thing above windows I forget the term for it). Keystone? I think that's the term?

I had trouble getting the colors to match up as well. The column is very muddy when recolored as well as the fence I used for the planters and some of the windows ... I don't know.... I just have trouble getting whites to look white. It's always a shade of gray and each item is a different shade of gray even though it's the same color used on everything. I don't get it.

Thanks for the offer of the lot but I don't think that is necessary. I will perhaps finish the project. I like to "dabble". I get creative and then go on building sprees. The main world I've been working on has smaller lots, the largest house being that one I showed you above with the sloping fence. Built by Petalbot, by the way.

Anyway, I was just messing around and as I said, I felt challenged. I hope that I've helped you out as well. We can feed off of each others creativeness!

I got those columns. The column is not in the base-game, but the set seems to provide various heights of the same column.
I have replaced the Geometric Columns (which were quite bulky and had the large grooves in them) with the Aspen Columns (thinner and lower profile, flows more smoothly).


I was unable to get the color of the brick to match perfectly, but I can deal with that later.


I also managed to get the garage fixed!
I had to extend the front wall of it out one tile which allowed my to slide each door to the left one tile. This created a 3-tile gap between the right-most garage door and the master bathroom. Not only did this get the garage door one tile further from the hinged door, but it also allowed me to replace the hinged door which was centered on 2 tiles with a single-tile version, which also got rid of that corner being covered by the wall!

That does look better! The problem I had with the columns was the roof. They showed through at the tops. After looking at my version..ugh..the roof stinks. You did a great job with your roof, it's spot on!

I like that octagonal window next to the garage..where is that from?

Did you know that you can recolor the line between floor levels...not sure what it is exactly....but you can recolor it to match.

The window is called The Hexagon Window. I believe it is from Lunar Lakes.

As for the roof, it is a rather simple roof, but made a bit more complicated by the fact that the roof over the entry is actually higher than the rest.
Here is some images showing a step-by-step guide:


And the finished result:



I remember being able to change the edge of the floor tiles, but couldn't remember how. I just tried it, and it is done using CASt (I always tried to wallpaper them).
As with anything in Sims 3, these have to be awkward to color. I think I got a good match, though.


I also made another house.



Now that I have all of Tussock Street built (with the exception of the one house which was originally here which I still plan to replace), I think my next step it so to go back through all the houses and add little details (gardens, shutters, etc).

@KatyFernlily
Did you ever finish your version of 3 Tussock?
I'm interested to see what you came up with.
I haven't been playing much in the past day or so. I have been watching The Expanse for the 4th or so time and Stellaris (a sci-fi grand strategy game) had an update the other day, so I have been contemplating playing it for a while. I think I might get to building another house tomorrow or so.

Last time I have played, I ran into an issue with these houses. All of the windows I use are modded (windows I either found or was linked to when I was looking for 6-panel doors), and I could not find any shutters to fit them. I think I remember there being rain gutters to run down the corners of the house, so that would be a nice touch to add.

Hey!
I have not. I haven't been in a building mood. But been in a downloading mood. lol. Also going through all my sims stuff and getting rid of things I don't use so I can fit in all this new stuff I found.
I did find a house I want to remodel for my little town I've been working on for...forever. I love doing makeovers ; )

Examples: https://imgur.com/a/nptoUlq - https://imgur.com/a/rm353QT
https://imgur.com/a/72HMi7M - https://imgur.com/a/G5XKxUQ - https://imgur.com/a/rjaXWiT Something to look at ; )

The shutters that I linked above (post#2) should work for your windows. They are shiftable and separated so they can fit almost any size window. They are a bit fussy in my game, I have to fool with them to get them just right. Using the moveobjects cheat helps also.

Can't decide what roof I like better

Interesting houses and such.

I think the 1st roof looks better (middle picture). The last roof looks like a wagon.

These are just the kind of houses that I'm looking to have in my game. Are they available to download? They are so beautiful.