The story is all too common in todays housing market: the basic principles of scale, proportion, balance, rhythm, and consistent architectural styles are often misapplied in new residential construction. Walk around almost any new development, and you will find dormers that are bigger than the front door, windows that are out of scale, too few or too many columns, and more. What Not to Build: Dos and Donts of Exterior Home Design shows these problems to the reader, then offers ways to fix and avoid them. Focusing on the exteriors of houses, the authorsall architects and designershave identified a number of problem designs. Through photographs and illustrations, the authors show how to solve problems by applying easy-to-understand design principles. Anyone reading the book will be able to avoid these problems when designing their own house, or fix problems that appear in the house theyre already living in.