“ This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.”

Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and let us know that it’s an affront to future generations. I’m glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in this age, but it’s so addictive...).

Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to purchasers and their response to something that lots of people find more comforting?

Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven earthen hovel isn’t for everyone?

I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned temperature management and comprehensive energy usage monitoring. That’s great for me and my family, but it’s a preference.

And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice, especially when you don’t have kids and can hear each other more easily.

I hate open concept with enough fury to heat all of Texas to boiling. They’re clearly built and sold to people who never have had to try to keep kids out of things.

And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.

Well, as childfree people, that was an appeal.

My home is majority open concept on 2 of 3 floors with high ceilings and even with 3 kids I can say it's more appealing than those 1-room-per-100sqft 80s/90s layouts. Turns out kids are people too and enjoy nice spaces just the same.

Add zoned areas for the rooms that need heat/cold to isolate your usage.

Zoning a house built with a 1 zone system is very expensive, and zoning doesn’t do much when the house looks like this:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809b2c...

You seem nice.

It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.

"So that people can feel rich and high status" is an insulting way to phrase "has a different set of architectural preferences than I do."

It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.

Houston is not a mild climate, based on how much AC usage I’ve seen there.

Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.

However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.

The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.

From a thermodynamics POV, we're very mild. We only ever really want to cool about 20F. Heating is nominal. Most places to the north end up with significantly more expensive heating needs AND roughly equivalent AC needs.

You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive. Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable thing you envision.

I'm very much in favour of this kind of aesthetic, but having both the heating on and the window open all winter is sad and should be unnecessary.

To be super clear: the amount of heating actually done in a normal Houston winter day is very very minimal. It's just that enough of it collects in the high point of a tall home that an open window is desirable for balance (and, honestly, humidity).

OP doesn't seem mean at all, just accurate that open floorplans these days are built poorly. When I was shopping for houses, I never saw a good open floorplan. They all had weird angles, flows that didn't make sense, and zero symmetry, and the asymmetry was terrible to. Open floorplans these days aren't built to be nice, they're built to sell.

Did I piss off an architect?

If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some definite atrocities.