tuscan-buildings

name	tuscan-buildings
description	Build game-ready Tuscan / Florentine townhouses in Three.js — walls, storeys, openings, quoins, hip roofs, interiors, and whole streets. Use whenever the task is an Italian palazzetto, casa a schiera, borgo, piazza, or any building that must look constructed rather than kitbashed. Captures the Casa Toscana campaign: elevations → meter-scale mesh → material splits → quoins → windows → rooms → night lamps → frost → a street of kin.
metadata	{"short-description":"Tuscan townhouses: walls, storeys, openings, roofs, streets","user-invocable":true}

Tuscan buildings

These houses are constructed, not decorated boxes. Every opening belongs to a room, every shutter can close, every quoin stops at a window, every roof tile is a coppo ~40 cm long. If it could not be built in Prato or a Florentine contrada, do not ship it.

When to use

• Any Tuscan / Umbrian / Florentine house, palazzetto, or street
• Elevations-to-mesh (orthographic FRONT / LEFT / RIGHT / REAR)
• Game-ready merged BufferGeometry assets (meters = world units)
• Interiors seen through glass (interior-mapping, not a second scene)

Read references/construction.md for the hard rules, references/street.md for placing more than one house, and references/street-furniture.md for piano-terra doors, barred windows, dado, and the Lucca/Prato photo language.

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1. Massing (do this first)

Storeys	Typical W × D	Eave	Notes
2 + attic	6–8 × 7–8 m	~6.5–7.5 m	Casa bassa, often a shop on the street
3	7–9 × 8–9 m	~9.5–10.5 m	Most common terrace house
4	10–12 × 9–10 m	~13–14 m	Palazzetto / casa signorile

• Street is +Z. Left = −X, right = +X, garden = −Z.
• Wall thickness 0.32–0.38 m. Never paper-thin.
• Floor-to-floor 3.2–3.5 m. Piano nobile (floor 1) can be taller.
• Ground floor sits on a stone plinth (~0.5 m). Small windows on piano terra have high sills (~1.7 m) — privacy, not cellar slits.

Floor band array, 4-storey reference:

FLOOR_Y = [0, 3.48, 6.72, 9.98, 13.35]  // last = eave

Do not invent a fifth storey to "look grand." Four is already a palazzetto.

2. Walls and materials

Street and piano nobile are stucco (warm ochre / cream / dusty rose). Garden and service sides are often exposed brick. A side wall is split: stucco toward +Z, brick toward −Z, meeting at a real edge (no coplanar overlay — overlays z-fight and bury windows).

Back wall: brick on the service bay only (≈ 1/3 of the width), stucco on the rest. Never slap a proud brick slab over window openings.

String courses (pietra serena) mark every floor. They wrap all four faces. Quoins (bugnato) climb every corner:

• Alternate long / short (0.40 / 0.28 m)
• Each stone sits on its face, inset toward the middle of that face
• Side stones slide out so their ends are flush with the front/back faces
• Skip any quoin that intersects a window or shutter swing
• Bricks/quoins can never overlap a shutter — the shutter could not close

3. Openings

Kinds that actually exist on these houses:

Kind	Where	Notes
arch-door	Street centre, piano terra	Rusticated stone, walnut panels, fanlight
plank-arch	Smaller casa	Green vertical boards in a rusticated arch
herringbone	Carriage / grand street door	Chevron green boards
carriage	Shop / garage	Wide green planks, no arch
rect-door	Garden / side service	Kitchen yard or dining garden
barred	Piano terra	High sill, dense rusted grid, stucco rebate
small	Piano terra or attic	Same high sill on the ground
rect-shutter	Floors 1–3	Tuscan casement + green open shutters
arch-balcony	Street centre, piano nobile / attic	French window, iron balcony
rect-balcony	Garden or side	Same, rectangular
louver	Bagno / stair	Closed shutters, no interior

Rules we learned the hard way:

• Every balcony has a door or french window. No orphan railings.
• Side walls need a full stack on the street half (all storeys), not just ground + one.
• Shutters sit proud of the brick (lz ≈ 0.20 m) on a plaster reveal. Same green wood everywhere — never mix a second shutter material.
• Frames are walnut, 4-pane casement, stone surround + sill + optional lintel.
• Doors are wood. You do not see through them.
• Quoins and shutters must not occupy the same bay. Reserve the bay (window + shutter swing) and skip stones that hit it.

4. Roof

Hip roof, terracotta coppi + tegole, tiles ~40 cm (uvPerMeter ≈ 0.36 on a 4–5-tile sheet). Colour is dusty brown-orange with lime bloom, never cherry red — do not multiply the albedo by a red tint.

• Eave overhang 0.40–0.50 m, timber soffit
• No ridge beams sticking out (no addOrientedCap hacks)
• Chimneys sit on the slope (roofHeightAt), brick stack + stone cap + two terracotta pots
• Downspouts at the corners, not mid-window

5. Rooms (the house is a plan, not wallpaper)

Adjacent windows that would be the same room share one interior. One stairwell, back-centre, every floor — not a stair in every bay.

Floor	Street	Garden L	Garden R	Centre back
0	parlours + androne	kitchen + service door	dining + garden door	stair / hall
1	salon (whole front)	dining	sitting + balcony	stair
2	master / study	bedroom	bedroom (louver = bagno)	stair
3	bedrooms + study	bedroom	bedroom	stair

Night: crush photographic sunlight in the interior maps, leave a warm lamp pool. Daylight interiors must not glow when the street is dark. Frost is on the glass (roughness + opacity + milk), not a 2-pixel blur behind a clear pane.

Shader interiors live on a portal plane just outside the glass. If the shader fails to compile, every window goes black — never ship two main().

6. A street of kin

Do not clone the hero. Vary:

• Storey count (2 / 3 / 4)
• Bay count (2 or 3)
• Width (6.4–11 m) and depth (7–9.5 m)
• Stucco tint (ochre, cream, dusty rose, greige)
• Brick fraction on the garden side
• Shop door vs domestic androne
• Chimney count

Keep one construction language: same quoins, same green shutters, same coppi, same plinth, same high piano-terra sills. Kin, not a theme park.

Place them with ~1.2–1.8 m alleys, street +Z, a cobble piazza, cypress at the corners. Houses across the street rotate Y = π.

7. Performance / game-ready

• Merge by material (≤ 10 draw calls per house)
• Meter scale, origin at plan centre, feet on y = 0
• GEOM_REV (or plan hash) in useMemo so HMR rebuilds
• No reverse-Z (breaks sky). Use wall insets + polygonOffset
• Export GLB from the house root, not the whole piazza

Finish checklist

• Street face is stucco; garden/service is brick; split is an edge
• Every balcony has an opening; every shutter can close
• Quoins flush, inset, never over a window
• Small ground windows have high sills
• Side street stacks run all storeys
• One stair, rooms shared by neighbouring windows
• Roof tiles large, dusty terracotta, hips clean
• Night interiors are lamp-lit, not sunny
• Neighbours are kin, not copies