Yes, that is what I am referring to. The tag is in use and can be found in the table of values to building=* included in the wiki page for building=house but there is no documentation for the tag itself.
And my opinion ist still that it is better to give that tag some kind of a rough definition (as already drafted above) instead of letting every user make up his mind how to use it.
I see there is a cluster in Genoa, I think all from one mapper 11 years ago. These donât generally seem to have the âconsiderable outdoor groundsâ characteristic, and judging by the narrow streets, they look like they were probably in an urban area even when built.
Usually I would not hesitate to write a wikipage for an existing tag unless there is a consensus to deprecate the tag to avoid further use. In view of the different opinions expressed here I have now made a draft, trying to consider also those participants who are not really happy with that tag:
The term villa originates from Latin and is nowadays in many European countries predominantly associated with prestigious residential buildings where architectural design takes precedence over pure utility value. In other countries, however, the term can also have a completely different meaning.
There is no clear definition, and the distinction from general residential buildings is fluid; whether a building is to be regarded as an average single-family or multi-family house or as a villa is at the discretion of the observer.
The use of the tag building=villa is therefore controversial. To ensure distinction from other established building tags, only buildings that fulfill the following criteria should be tagged as building=villa:
Furthermore, the building often is surrounded by a large sized and individually designed garden. Many villas are located in particularly spacious suburban areas, known as âvilla districtsâ in several countries.
However, there are also urban villas with relatively small plots. These often have elaborately designed impressive façades but rather inconspicuous rear sides that are not visible from the street.
If these criteria are not met or you are in doubt, you should use other building tags such as building=detached. This does also apply to houses having been named by the owner as âVilla *****â, as a name only does not make a villa.
Just let me know it this is acceptable so that we can close this topic and move on.
Itâs a great start, but Iâd make sure to include some images to make the points clearer, possibly even two sets of images to illustrate the two clusters that @Vinzenz_Mai described.
It might also be worth reviewing the Genoa cluster that @alan_gr found and deciding whether those match any of the descriptions listed in this thread. I suspect these may be outliers.
Also, I have a couple questions about the wording you used in some passages:
If youâre covering both possibilities, why bother specifying at all? Wouldnât it be easier to simply say âdetached residential buildingâ?
What exactly does âof the same classificationâ mean here? Maybe it would be better to be more specific.
A villa canât be semi-detached? Surely this below is a villaâand gated communities with semi-detached villas are way more popular where I live (because they take up less space). So I would definitely also qualify them as villas. I agree with the rest of what youâre saying though, âvillaâ is more precise and better than âhouseâ.
I had thought a villa was a free standing detached house. But from the last few posts it seems it can also be a semi detached house or a multi family apartment building.
The widely used building tags normally allow mappers to distinguish between those building types. But if villa ia used as the primary tag, that information would be lost. There would be no way for a user of map data to know if a building is a large house or an apartment building.
Should the documentation suggest a way to avoid losing that information?
I know several communities like this. Normally all the houses have broadly similar designs. Would you consider them all villas? From previous discussions I thought some level of architectural uniqueness was required.
To be honest, this example just looks like a normal house at the upper end of the market to me (but not the top end, as really rich people donât share a wall with their neighbours). It would never have occurred to me that it needs a special primary tag.
No, itâs just a posh house that an estate agent wanted to charge more money for.
The building type in OSM is just that - a building type. The word âvillaâ isnât being used for that here - itâs simply saying âthis is a better or more expensive X than other Xs of the same typeâ. That might be worth recording somehow in OSM if some sort of verifiable tag can be found - but it doesnât replace the building type.
Iâm saying, this is called a villa here, not that I think this is called a villa. The definition obviously varies from country to countryâŠ
Yes, absolutely. How can they make a different architecture style for each unit in a 54-villas housing estate? They may be (logically) similar at the gated-community level but theyâre different from other houses outside of that gated community. Once again, itâs not that deep, as the term differs a lot between countries, and especially between the US, the UK and the Mediterranean countries, where the term seems more widespread. When I think about the term âhouseâ I think about those suburban houses that you can find in the USA or Canada, and I can personally see a big difference between this and a villa. It may not be the case for everyone.
Then maybe building=house and house=villa?
OSM uses British English tags and values. You canât do that here, because âvillaâ simply doesnât mean that in the UK (other than a term to add a few quid to the price, or describing a roman farmstead from 2000 years ago). If you had to define this type of house using words, how would you do that?
I understand that, but are you saying the tag should be used according to what âvillaâ means in each country, rather than trying to document a broadly consistent meaning globally? How would villa then be more precise than house, as you suggested?
(This kind of house is sometimes called a âchaletâ in Spain, so the same logic would suggest building=chalet⊠but letâs not go there).
I wouldnât expect them to. Itâs just that the whole concept of a 54 villa housing estate of similar houses seems to contradict earlier definitions in this thread which suggested a more customised design.
I honestly still donât understand the difference. Obviously the specific examples are very different (pitched versus flat roofs and so on). But I donât understand what differences contribute to villa-ness, based on these examples.
That seems a better idea. It would avoid losing information about the main building type while allowing mappers who feel a villa is something objective to express that, on the understanding there is no global meaning (and specifically that it does not correspond to the English meaning). It might need the semantics to be clarified for a building mapped as detached etc. rather than simply house.
I think in Britain you would use different names for villas, e.g. some could be called âcountry homeâ (I guess there is a big span of houses within this category, from castle like buildings to cottages(?)) and what is a âstately homeâ in the British country side, elsewhere would be called a villa.
Being in Italy, there is also a wide range of âvillasâ ranging from huge and important âcastlesâ to smaller, modern houses with garden (to add a few quid to the sales price).
When there are extensive, playful flights of stairs with integrated fountains âin the gardenâ, the term is definitely not an overstatement, e.g. Villa Torlonia a Frascati:
Or Villa Lante near Viterbo:
which also features a reflection pool:
and some decorative hedges (view from the Villa to the garden)
Similarly Villa Doria Pamphilj in Rome:
Which also has extensive gardens (now one of the biggest parks in Rome):
There is an article about these modern Villas (as opposed to antique roman villas), with more well known examples, here in the Italian Wikipedia.
It also has this example for a Villa in England (Greenwich), the style is described as neopalladian (which hints at Andrea Palladio who is known for his Venetian Villas, i.e. English architecture inspired by Italian architecture, hence the term âvillaâ):
There is also this paragraph about English villas in the Palladian architecture article:
The villa tradition continued throughout the late 18th century, particularly in the suburbs around London. Sir William Chambers built many examples, such as Parkstead House.[94] But the grander English Palladian houses were no longer the small but exquisite weekend retreats that their Italian counterparts were intended as. They had become âpower housesâ, in Sir John Summersonâs words, the symbolic centres of the triumph and dominance of the Whig Oligarchy who ruled Britain unchallenged for some fifty years after the death of Queen Anne.[95][96] Summerson thought Kentâs Horse Guards on Whitehall epitomised âthe establishment of Palladianism as the official style of Great Britainâ.[63] As the style peaked, thoughts of mathematical proportion were swept away. Rather than square houses with supporting wings, these buildings had the length of the façade as their major consideration: long houses often only one room deep were deliberately deceitful in giving a false impression of size.[97]
Iâve clicked through a lot of the wikipedia pages of buildings that could be called âvillasâ / âstately homesâ / âcountry housesâ / âmanorsâ / âmansionsâ etc to see what the current OSM tagging of those is.
Somehow most seem to be just âbuilding=yesâ, but they often have a historic tag to show what is special about them: Either historic=castle with castle_type=stately or castle_type=manor, or else historic=manor.
Not surprisingly, âvillasâ that were built since the industrial revolution donât seem to get the historic tags much. Mappers seem to think that they are to modern for that. So this may be where the wish to have a tag for a âvillaâ makes sense.
Since the understanding of the word âvillaâ seems to vary too much, I wouldnât recommend using it. If we agree that all âvilla-likeâ buildings were built to be a place to live, then we should use building=house|detached|residential. Then we could add a second level tag like house=representative|mansion. I kind of like âmansionâ, since itâs short and fits the minimal description of a large, impressive house. This could be added to old and recent buildings that were âbuilt to impressâ.
Yes, for sure I will do that.
You are right, we should keep it as simple as possible and the wording I chose is misunderstandable. I will change it to
There is no need for different architectural styles, just for individual architectural design and it is not a problem at all to built 54 villas with individual design each. In the so called âKaiserbĂ€derâ at the baltic sea (like Bansin and Heringsdorf), you will find hundreds of villas facing the sea and not 2 of them look alike, unless one owner builds 2 of them and wants them to look identical.
The individual design is one of the most important features for those people spending lot of money to build a villa.
We could do that, but if you look at the wiki page for building=house you will see that most mappers prefer to use building=* instead of building=house + house=*. And it would not make a difference in the end. building=villa implies that it is a detached residential building, so no need to tag that separately.
Again âmansionâ is not exactly the same as a âvillaâ. Simply spoken Iâd say a mansion is a very large villa build for a extremely rich family clan or for high government representatives and the like. building=mansion has some 150 uses so far, whereas house=mansion has only 2. And yes, building=mansion would also deserve its own wiki page imo.
I have now created the wiki page for building=villa and hope it meets the requirements.
It says " A large and representative family home of exclusive architectural design 
" but whatever language that is in it isnât British English (see above ad nauseam).
It does then say that âusage is controversialâ, ATYL and all that, but encouraging people to use a meaningless tag isnât really more helpful than building=house.
I am not sure about the meaning of your post. Is it that
âA large and representative family home of exclusive architectural designâ
is not British English or is it that
âvillaâ
is not British English? At least my dictionary tells me that both is and although maybe not very common in the UK there are some villas and they are called villas:
Both fit the description given on the wiki page. The tag may be meaningless for you bit it is not for me and some other users.
âvillaâ is not British English for "A large and representative family home of exclusive architectural designâ.
It is an estate-agent-speak ânoise wordâ, intended to convey quality (actually, just a higher price) over other offerings in the same category. It doesnât mean âindividually designedâ, it just means âI as an estate agent am trying to justify to you why this perfectly ordinary house costs more than some other perfectly ordinary houseâ. A planned estate of tiny bungalows might be described as âvillasâ.
Itâs a common theme in British English - in a restaurant you can sometimes calculate the price based on the number of adjectives per item on the menu, but it does not imply quality.
We have bus hire services sold as âexecutive coach travelâ. An âexecutiveâ is someone in a management position in a business - probably doing more than ordering paperclips. They probably donât travel by bus much. âVillaâ is a similarly meaningless word.
If you want to describe individually-designed-by-an-architect houses, perhaps use a tag that means that (perhaps a subtag of âhouseâ)?
I added
Consider using {{tag|building|house}} and other tags as use of {{tag|building|villa}} adds very little clear info, if any as its definition is unclear, controversial and problematic.
And linked back this thread
And set simple description to |description=Unclear value, please avoid using it
@SomeoneElse (got cut off by post from Mateusz):
If that is so please be so kind to tell me the correct term for these kind of buildings called âvillaâ in at least some European countries (and sometimes in UK as well according to the examples given above). I added a lot of pictures for illustration from various countries and I believe it is not that very difficult to distinguish this type of building from perfectly ordinary houses.
If the meaning of âvillaâ in Britsh English is nothing but bullshit does not mean at the same time it is so all over Europe and I still believe it is fair enogh to allow a specific tagging for those buildings even if in your eyes it is nonsense.
Anyhow, if there is a consensus that âvillaâ is nothing but a âreal estate agents noise wordâ it should be deprecated to make clear that the use of this term is against the âuse British Englishâ rule. No wahalla.
