Ah, the town planners in all their genius, issuing diktats by whim and in reaction to NIMBY pressure.

Architecturally, a large traditional home should have a proportionately large roof.

You can do pretty well with a 35-foot limit.

But how is the height measured?

Where I am now, it's measured at the midpoint from the eaves to the peak in relation to the midpoint of the street. So the more uphill your lot, the lower your roof will be. In another area, height was measured to the actual peak from the average of the grade across the front elevation.

My current home was built with a 30-foot from mid-point of street to midpoint of roof limit using a traditional hip roof. Frankly, I don't care for the way I did it, as the roof appears too flat. And unless you are at the street, the roof disappears completely from view.

Other builders have coped with this problem by using a chateau type roof (as in the neighbouring house), essentially a flat roof or by using a number of gables at the front to hide the flat roof behind. Think all those false front buildings in the old Western movies.

ours is around 41' at the peak on the low side of the hill. It is around 28-29' floor to peak inside the house. Our county limit is 35' but the have some avg. slope calculation that they apply of you are on a hill.

here are some pics that i could find real quick.

We are at 27.5' to the peak at the front and about 36 to the peak on the back side. We don't have any code restrictions that I know of.

The building code for our suburb has a 40-foot limit, ground to peak; 50-foot setbacks from the center of the road; 25-foot side yard setbacks.

HOWEVER...Enter the Building Review Board. (DH calls them the seven meddling fools -- none are architects -- all live in small nondescript homes.) They decided that our roof was 'too high' at 28 feet. We had to re-draw plans, reducing height by ONE FOOT. They didn't want our house to 'tower' over our neighbor's 1950's story-and-a-half -- which was torn down two years later, replaced by a 5000 sq ft two story that is 32 feet high. (At least the BRB kept them from building 40 feet high.)

We built to live one-story (9-foot ceilings), but with a full attic that can be developed into BRs and baths by adding dormers, thus doubling the living space. (The FAR for our acre-plus allows 5000+ sq ft.)

Ours is 42 feet tall from the ground to the top of the gable roof.