Fenris's mansion, how does it work?

I’d never realized before that there’s a third floor even in the game, though I figured there must be more rooms than we’re shown (same with the Amell estate, or else neither would be a very functionally designed house considering we never see, for example, a kitchen in either of them) because those rooms are not necessary for gameplay. But with the Hightown mansions all (except the Amell estate) sharing the same basic floorplan, it was easier to notice in the mansion entered in Night Lies, since it’s furnished there, and not obscured by a beam of moonlight and dust particles. Where are the stairs to that floor, though, who knows.

There's a whole room there with an open wall and space for a bunch of bookcases, and a door leading to presumably a balcony/roof terrace since it's flanked by windows.

A small indoors balcony with a door to??? It's flanked by windows, too, so maybe you enter this balcony through a terrace that has an entrance to the house elsewhere? ...or it's just indoors windows.

Also considering everything is probably condensed for ease of gameplay I don’t know if there’s much sense in trying to line up outer walls of buildings with the interior, but I can’t help but wonder about things like what do Fenris’s windows have a view of.

The windows on the other side of the great hall show some buildings, and also trees. The Hightown map doesn’t indicate there being an open space on that side of the mansion, but maybe there’s a small private garden fenced in by other buildings. I wonder if Merrill ever ends up there by accident somehow like she does at the Viscount’s garden.

Windows on the other side of the hall showing trees... a garden?

One of the bedrooms also has a balcony you can't go to in the game, the door to it is fenced off but you can see some of it through the windows. It's the room on the right seen from the stairs to the upper level. The balcony seems to be overlooking that garden I also suspect is there.

The fenced-off door.

The outside of that door seen through a window from the staircase.

 Yep, that's a balcony.

There's also a fourth floor? and not seeing a terrace at 3rd floor height so I guess it was indoors windows.

It doesn’t help that you enter the building through one door in Hightown but depending on whether it’s during or after Bait and Switch, you end up in two different rooms on the opposite sides of the mansion. I’m going to assume that in Bait and Switch you enter through a back door to be stealthy (at least until Fenris decides he’s through with stealth mode) and it being the same door on the outside is just to avoid confusing players about where the mansion is located. So the door in Hightown “really” leads to the more formal-looking entrance hall, which also matches how you enter all other mansions with the same layout.

That means the windows in the room Fenris is found in once he moves in face... the stairs to the Viscount’s Keep. Again it might be a case of condensed locations for convenience of gameplay that Fenris’s mansion seems to sit right between the Chantry and the Viscount’s Keep, but I guess the windows in the room Fenris presumably uses the most overlooking the busy walkway to the Keep is good reason for him to keep them shuttered.

Looking up at what should be the mansion from the Viscount's Way.

Assuming the mansion is indeed right next to the Viscount's Way, apparently despite being a privately owned building it also has the Keep’s banners on one of its walls, as does the building on the other side, presumably also a mansion.

View from the chantry. Between the buildings on the left in the distance, with banners on them, is the Viscount's Way. Out of these two buildings, Fenris's mansion should be the one on the right.

There’s no door where the back door through which you probably enter the mansion during Bait and Switch should be, but a likely location for it is the shadowy alcove where you can find a crate to loot. It’s either that or from the Viscount’s Way, anyway.

The back door should be somewhere around here?

Also, despite the outside of the mansion showing a straight wall on every side for at least two stories, most of the side rooms on the lower level have broken ceilings that show sky. So… is the mansion shaped so there’s a ring of rooms on the upper level along the outside wall, then a gap of roof or terrace, and a room/high ceiling for the main hall at the center? I’m voting terrace, because that would explain the doors going somewhere on the upper level rooms we can’t visit, and there being windows on the same walls as those doors. Although it’s of course possible that the playable portion of the mansion is not the ground floor to begin with.

 

(DA2 spoilers for the following paragraph:)
Speaking of all the mansions having the same floor plan, I don’t think Fenris actually kept dead bodies in his home for ~7 years, and here’s why. Well, for starters I think Fenris is a tidier person than that, but also, his mansion and Bartrand’s from Family Matter are the exact same map, floor tiles and ceiling broken in the exact same way and everything, and the exact same dead bodies in the exact same locations. Bartrand’s place has a few extra bodies, but the ones seen at Fenris’s mansion are there, too. Bioware made one spooky edit of the generic mansion, and the bodies are just part of it. That they couldn’t be bothered to edit them for reusing the map for a different spooky mansion apart from adding a few more makes it pretty plausible they just couldn’t be bothered to delete the bodies from Fenris’s mansion after Bait and Switch. The bodies are gone from Bartrand’s when the gang returns there for the Haunted quest, but it’s not that they just deleted the bodies from that map, the whole map is replaced with the non-spooky version (as Varric has had the place refurbished to sell it) which never had the bodies. Fenris is not a slob, Bioware is.