Vvardenfell Architectural Styles

Great House Style
The three Dunmer great houses that have settled Vvardenfell have distinctive architectures and lifestyles. Aristocratic, warlike Great House Redoran favors a spacious, irregular, organic building style. Great House Hlaalu, an agressive merchantile power, strongly admiring and influenced by Imperial culture, prefers simpler, more modern, more densely populated settlements, while bizarre wizard towers dominate mushroom hut villages of the Telvanni sorceror lords.

A fourth Great House style, the Velothi or Temple style, is evident in monumental architecture, bridges, buttresses, and grand canals of the ancient religious center of Vivec City.

Dunmer Metropolitan Style
Vivec City presents a unique panorama of high Dunmer architectural style. Grand multi-tiered blocks are arranged along canals. High bridges lead across the canals to the block top markets and plazas, while below gondoliers guide flat bottomed skiffs along the canals. The whole city is overshadowed by the grand monumental architectures of Vivec's Palace and the Archcanon's High Fane.

Dunmer Urban Style
Urban Temple compounds feature high walled outer courtyards, with smaller shelters and halls clustered around the Temple shrine itself. Aristocratic residences of the Great Houses are similar to Temple compounds with walled outer courts and outbuildings for craftsmen and servants, dominated by a grand manor residence in place of the Temple Shrine.

Dunmer Village Style
The Dunmer villages style is the most familiar style in all of the districts. Huts are built of local materials, with organic curves and undecorated exteriors inspired by the landscape and the shells of giant native insects. Villages are dominated by Temple compounds and courtyards in traditional villages, but in newer plantations, the manor houses are the central features.

Imperial Urban Style
Imperial urban style mixes with Dunmer urban style in Hlaalu district and Vivec suburbs, but dominates in new Hlaalu and Imperial chartered towns. Houses, shops, and tradehouses are of timbered, half timbered, or stone construction in the Western manner, with peaked roofs, right angles and flat planes, and plain, unddecorated exteriors.