Roof Deck

[Elovia]

I don't have Suite, so I'm not fully cognizant of its limitations. The ideas proposed below work in Pro, so let me know if they don't work for you in Suite and we'll try to come up with another solution.

I was able to make a flat roof by creating a floor without a ceiling/roof and selecting decking as the material for the floor as explained in the referenced tutorial. BUT - I'm not able to add a railing around the roof deck and I don't want a 4 foot tall parapet blocking all the nice breeze on the roof deck. Any thoughts?

Select an exterior wall and open it's Wall Specification dialog. On the Railing tab, put a check in the Specify Railing box, and then choose the type of railing you want in the radio buttons below.

The next item is connecting the stairs to the roof deck. I created a stairway from the back deck, but I can't make a break in the parapet wall to connect the stairs to the roof deck. Any thoughts here?

Enclose the area of the floor that you want removed with rails or invisible walls, and then define that area as Open Below in the Room Specification dialog.

By the zoning statement, I meant that they (the city) require a pitched roof(6/12 min), but I want a flat roof with a roof deck. My first thought was to propose a pitched/angled/peaked parapet at the front of the house to mimic the pitched roof look, but I couldn't figure out how to do that and I fell back on the front partial roof design you see in the picture.

As an engineer, I'm curious about the origin of the requirement for a pitched roof. Is it for structural reasons (e.g., heavy snow load, or wind loads)? Or is it for architectural reasons (e.g., historical preservation)? Often these types of ordinances are not arbitrary. Shaping a building is not the same as making it structurally sound. I'll leave this topic alone except to say that however you design your project, you will likely need to have a licensed professional engineer review your plans, and then you'll likely need to go through the process of getting a zoning variance. How you do these things is not a function of the software. :sly:

I'll still take any ideas you have on making the pitched/angled/peaked parapet.

I'm not sure if Suite has this capability, but if you can manually edit walls, you can take an elevation of the wall in question and select it. Then use the break line tool to create a break along the top. Grab and drag the break point upward to create a peak.

Otherwise, you may need to create a roof, and then assign "no material" to the surfaces to make them invisible. (just thinking out loud on this)