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.
The hall to live in
Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
The Arts and Crafts architects looked back past the Victorian villa, with its narrow passage and its row of little rooms, to the hall of the medieval house, where the household had lived together. Baillie Scott, Voysey, Lutyens and Parker and Unwin all built halls that were living rooms: broad, warm, lit by a big window. Baillie Scott would have the stair enclosed or banished from the hall altogether, and suggested the hall might serve as the dining room too; Parker and Unwin let the stair stay, placed where its traffic would not cross the seats by the fire.
In the Edwardian house the idea was widely taken up, if often in a smaller form: a hall large enough to sit in, with a fireplace and a seat, in place of the long passage.
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.
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.
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.
Do without the parlour kept for show, and reduce the entrance hall to a small vestibule or a nook of the living room: let the front door open, through it, into a living room built round a large fireplace, open widely into the dining room, with seats, bookcases and cupboards built into its walls.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The hall to live in”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/living-hall. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.