Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rules · Doors & windows · Façades · Light
The bay window
Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.
Bay windows had been built in great houses since the Middle Ages, lighting the high table at the upper end of the hall. In the nineteenth century they became the mark of the suburban house: the excise duty on glass was abolished in 1845 and the window tax repealed in 1851, and large panes of cheap sheet glass made the canted bay, often rising through two storeys under a gable, the standard front of the Victorian villa and terraced house.
The bay also suited the Gothic Revival’s demand that the outside should show the inside. The gable and the bay say where the drawing room is; the plain wall beside them, with the door under its porch, says where the hall and stair are.
Related rules
Make the roof visible, and bring its eaves down low enough, and far enough out, that the building reads as a shelter from the street and the garden.
Glaze a roof in a series of small ridges and valleys, the panes set at an angle on light sash bars, so that the low sun of morning and evening strikes the glass more squarely, the roof is stiffened by its folds, and the rain runs into gutters in the furrows.
Date a Gothic window by its tracery: openings pierced through a plate (twelfth century); geometric bar tracery of circles and foils (thirteenth); flowing curvilinear tracery of ogees and daggers (fourteenth); and, in England, perpendicular panel tracery with mullions running straight up into the arch (late fourteenth to sixteenth).
Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The bay window”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/bay-window. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.