Here’s a magic trick. Take any time you’ve done any thing ever. Think intently about what you were doing. Visualize it in your head: Where you were, who you were with, etc. Here’s where the magic part happens. Now consider that exact same thing you were doing, except, this time you’re on a roof. Way better, right?

There’s actually no magic here. Hanging out on the roof is just a consistently sublime experience.

It’s hard for me to fathom why so few residences enable (much less encourage!) robust roof access. This seems to me to be the most consistently underutilized part of the house. I get that some places are cold. And for structural reasons it’s not great to have a flat roof in places where it snows frequently (usually, there’s a high correlation between these two). Though even still—you could totally pay the neighborhood kid $10 to shovel the snow off the roof like he would for your driveway.

You’re probably making money on the deal, anyway. Adding an extra bedroom to a house raises the property value by a couple thousand dollars. And that’s not even adding livable real estate—just rearranging some walls.

San Francisco doesn’t have a single decent rooftop bar near the water. Plenty of bars near the water, and plenty of roofs. Nobody thought to merge the two. And I mean, if St. Louis with its myriad of weather problems can figure out a rooftop bar, I can’t see why any complaints about the wind or the heat would have any weight here.

Moral of the story is this: When I design a house for myself down the road, the roof will be my 2nd* most prized and relished feature. Rooftopping it will be a hobby. I’ll have a staircase from the backyard that you can ascend like a normal human—no fire escapes, musky hatches, attic trespasses necessary. Maybe a grill, or a hammock, swimming pool…anything you can put in a backyard you can totally put on the roof. And rooftop parties, always.

(*Of course there’ll be the Idiots in a Box room in the basement. Either you know what I mean or you don’t.)