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 · Plans · Façades · Site
The veranda
Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.
Downing held that a house should suit its climate as well as its owners, and in the American summer the veranda was for him a positive luxury, if not, like a kitchen or a bedroom, an absolute necessity: the smallest cottage might go without, but any house above the merely useful should have one, to keep the sun off the rooms, give shade at the hottest hours, and be where the family sat in the evening.
From the 1850s the veranda became the common front of the American house, and spread with British building to Australia, India and the Caribbean; in England it was used more sparingly, on the garden side of villas and seaside houses.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
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.
Build on a single grid of 24 feet, set by the 8-foot spacing of the roof ridges and the size of the largest pane of glass, so that every column, girder, sash bar and pane is one of a few standard parts that can be made by machine, delivered and bolted together in any number.
pane 49 × 10 in · ridge 8 ft · bay 24 ft · spans 24, 48, 72 ft · 1,848 × 408 ft
Plan the house in two departments, the family’s and the servants’, with their own rooms and passages (and, as the house grows larger, their own stairs), so that neither sees nor hears the other in the ordinary course of the day: the kitchen and its offices to one side or behind, reached by their own corridor, and nothing of the work of the house carried through the family’s rooms.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The veranda”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/downing-veranda. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.