[pjmiami]

I think all of us who are transplants from "up north" are shocked when we notice that houses don't have gutters. When we bought our house here in 1990, it had gutters. Prior to selling that house in 2005, we did some extensive updating and repair. One of the things that the foreman who was in charge of our "project" (they all end up being projects here!) was that: 1) only people from up north ask if gutters are needed on houses here; 2) they aren't generally needed; 3) in our case, we spent a great deal of money repairing and replacing the soffits that had rotted because we DID have gutters on the house originally. So, off they went and we had no problems with drainage or anything else after that. I will say that if you have a spot with plantings right underneath a corner where water pours off the roof, then you can expect those plantings to get seriously drenched. However, plan around that and you should not need gutters and can avoid bigger more expensive problems in the long run.

[riveree]

Intersting points.

I don't have gutter on my current home (new build), and don't plan to put any on.

The design of the roof (hip roof) is to have deep overhangs, so I've had no problem with the runoff. The rain runs off the roof far enough away not to affect the siding, it's equally distributed since I am not altering it in any way, and my landscaping does fine.

So far, I haven't found a reason to add the gutters on, nor have my neighbors(and I don't like the look of them either).

[olivebranchian]

My new house has no gutters. I was sold on the idea of not putting them on because a builder (that did not build my house) told me that there is no way for a gutter to carry the amount of water that comes down a house with 3000 sq feet to it or so without wash-over unless there are more downspouts than can be attractively placed.
However, I will be puting on gutters.
I've realized that as water washes off the roof and slaps down onto the ground by the house, the brick will absorb some of that water. This is how a lot of brick turns green after while, growing moss and mold from the absorbed water.