The wiki page for building=house recommends more specific values for building=*, on of them is building=villa. This tag has some 600 uses but no separate wiki page. We have discussed this in the german forum and I would like to document this tag at least in the german wiki.
How about an english wiki page? If documentation is ok I could write one. I know that villa has different meanings in different parts of the world but I would generally describe it as a residential building of representative character where architectural design is of prior rank to utility value. This corresponds to a very common understanding of a villa and when you search the internet most pictures you get show such buildings.
I feel some of the “villa” characteristics are already captured by building=detached, which is already more specific than house.
If the architectural qualities are prominent, there’s also the building:architecture key which has seen some use.
Now you have to add support for yet another top-level feature to mean a variety of single-family building. In the meantime, any specific application support for the building=house will be missing.(That’s why I personally prefer building=house + house= )
Is =villa necessarily detached? What should be used for “residential building of representative character where architectural design is of prior rank to utility value” which are semi-detached or in a row? Building=villa?
How do you distinguish them from any rich people’s home? Is it supposed to be traditional, historic, or grand looking, not modern sleek? Because photos of the latter is what I see in search, not the German post examples.
Perhaps unrelatedly, I thought of historic=manor , which doesn’t have a specific building= for it now. Should they be historic=manor + building=villa , not building=manor ?
To get an idea of the possible variation and how vague this is, “In the early modern period, any comfortable detached house with a garden near a city or town was likely to be described as a villa; most survivals have now been engulfed by suburbia. In modern parlance, “villa” can refer to various types and sizes of residences, ranging from the suburbansemi-detached double villa to, in some countries, especially around the Mediterranean, residences of above average size in the countryside.” Villa - Wikipedia
It seems mostly mass added in 2014, 2017, and 2021 osm tag history
The concentration is in Italy
That was exactly my first thought: isn’t a villa just a posh detached house? Possibly with an implication that it is used as a secondary/holiday residence or a home away from the city.
As a native English speaker, the whole concept of “architecture being more important than utility” would never have occurred to me. I’m not sure if it is a good idea to have a top-level key for an important tag like building that depends so heavily on studying the wiki in detail.
A further disadvantage is that villa is still a sort of foreign-sounding word in English but a common word in several other languages. It might well end up being applied to lots of houses with “Villa” in the name by mappers who see it in a drop down list when mapping buildings, losing the specific information you were trying to capture.
If there is genuinely a verifiable concept to be tagged here, maybe it’s something for a secondary tag, that is more likely to be used by mappers who have actively looked for this kind of thing in the wiki?
Villas according to signs on the ground (I coincidentally just happened to pass these after reading this post)
Would I tag these as building=villa because that’s what the sign says? But I don’t think design ranks above utility here. How could I verify that, though?
Do you? What do you mean by “add support” and why do you have to? In my maps, I treat unknown building values like “yes”, so I don’t have to special case anything I am not interested in (and these are actually most of the building values)
This one in my book would be a “castle”, it is called the “royal villa” but also the “reggia” (royal court). I don’t think it would be a problem tagging it as a big villa either, because the differences might be fluid.
well, a Villino is not necessarily a Villa, at most it is a small Villa but it can also be used in different context (apartmentbuilding with garden, or even holiday homes).
The Villa Mirabello from the 15th century which is described to have a loggia in the courtyard and an annexed chapel, quite surely is a Villa, is architecturally significant and has a representative character. “luxury” is not a requirement that was mentioned.
I would not. There are many such “self-declared” villas (in the name), their idea is to borrow some “glamour” from the villa term, but IMHO what we see in the picture is not sufficient for building=villa.
I do not know if I should see this as a good idea or not, at the moment I tend to see it as a bad idea.
In German the use of the term villa is probably quite clear (or at least clear for a german speaker like me).
How is it in (british) English? I do not know, this must be answered by a native speaker of that language, but we should always have this (OSM mothertongue) language in mind.
How is it in other countries around the world? Do we get a mess of “wrong” tags. The pictures further up in this thread show examples that might (and probably will) apear.
Also a look at the wikipedia page for villa Villa - Wikipedia shows some points to have in mind. I just quote the one sentence with the thougts that came to my mind first:
In Denmark, Norway and Sweden “villa” denotes most forms of single-family detached homes, regardless of size and standard.
I hope we do not get just one more tourism=wilderness_hut …
Sure, but a villa is not merely a “detached” building for residential purpose. It is also an architectural statement and can be seen as a kind of artwork, compared to an average house. Besides that, a villa is not exclusively a single family residence, it can also include several apartments or be designed as a duplex building.
The key building:architecture=* is a key for experts only. Would you be able to specify if a building design represents Renaissance Revival or Baroque Revival architecture, or maybe even Art Noveau? I am sure 99% of all mappers would not but the same 99% would be able to distinguish a villa from an average residential building.
Again “villa” is already an established value for building and the only question is: do we want to have it documented or use it without documentation.
In modern English the term villa is most commonly used to mean a large self contained holiday home in the sun. In the same way a chalet is in the snow.
Also used to describe a Roman period house. In terms of usage I have never heard the term used to describe a house so to me as a native English speaker villa means little to me beyond my next holiday.
I’m not sure where this meaning comes from, I am not familiar with it, certainly outside a specialist context.
I honestly doubt that. Perhaps with sufficiently clear guidance, which I haven’t seen so far.
That’s how I see it also. Searching the internet for villas in English overwhelmingly brings up that kind of thing. Lots of large houses with swimming pools in Spain and Italy that are definitely not architectural statements.
I understand that the point is to document something that is already in use (saying 600 uses is “established” seems a bit of a stretch). What did the mappers who used it intend to convey? If it’s a relatively specialised concept that would only apply to a tiny minority of buildings the documentation should make that clear, to avoid it being used for any slightly-more-pretentious-than-average house.
Thanks for your comments. I want to point out once again that I do not want to introduce a new value but just give an existing value a documentation, describing how building=villa may be used in OSM.
I do not want to argue about that - as I said in the OP “villa” has different meanings in different parts of the world. Anyhow I believe it would be good to give the existing value some kind of documentation in the wiki.
If you look for “villa” in Wikimedia Commons which I believe is a good source for representative pics for a certain term you will primarily find those buildings I have tried to describe:
Nevertheless I have no problem by leaving building=villa an undocumented value in the english wiki. I personally do not need such a wikipage, I was just offering to create one.
At least in UK/IE, the building key has all sorts of “long tail” values in it. As a value, villa is pretty meaningless in English but so are many of the other values used in what is essentially a free-entry field that people are encouraged not to put yes in.
If anything, there are too many documented values on the buildings page already, not too few - for example, what’s the difference between a farm_auxiliary and a barn?
A barn is a barn whereas a farm auxiliary can be any building in a farmyard I am not able to specify. I understand this as the same difference between a residential vs. a detached or any other more specific value.
Most of these look like a collection of normal houses one would find in wealthy neighborhoods to me? With a few looking more like manors or vacation homes. I do not think I would be able to distinguish a “villa” from a normal large house in OSM terms via these examples or the definition posted above.
In common usage (as a native US English speaker) I think of a villa as vaguely denoting a large, luxurious house, probably with some sort of grounds and/or outdoor leisure features like pools or tennis courts that rich people in warm places enjoy. But it’s not a very distinct concept.
… and people building such houses usually want an exclusive design from their architect and pay a lot of money for features like columns, oriels, turrets and other protruding building parts, rounded windows, nested roofs and the like which are merely design elements and do not add utility value.
And this type of house is called villa in many countries.
I would go for documentation documenting that it is unclear, has no really specific value and that it does not really add much over building=house if used (you can simply check area of geometry to get large houses)
This is true, and because also rich people like to get some value for money they will usually ask their architect to build them an exclusive and representative house to impress others. The result in most cases will be a villa as described in my OP.
The same applies for most of the other tags for residential buildings. Just check the size and the surrounding and you will know if it es detached, semi-detached, terraced or else.
Both these buildings are referred to as “villa” where I live. The line is too blurry. When is a building “architecturally aesthetic/rich” enough for it to become a villa instead of a house?
