Turn the principal front of the villa to the south; put the rooms for summer to the north, the rooms for winter to the south and west, and the rooms for spring and autumn to the east, looking over the gardens.
Palladio takes the rule from Vitruvius, who orders each part of a house by the sun and the season. The rooms used in summer are to be ample and turned to the north for shade and the wind; the rooms for winter small, and turned to the south and west for the sun, since small rooms are the more easily warmed. Those for spring and autumn face the east and, in Isaac Ware’s translation of 1738, “ought to look over greens and gardens”.
In the second book he draws the house of a villa as he understood the ancients to have built it, and says of it that “the principal front is turned to the south”, with its loggia, while the cellars and granaries behind take their light from the north.
Lift the dome on a cylindrical or polygonal drum pierced with windows between the ring of the pendentives and the springing of the dome, to light the centre of the church and to make the dome visible from afar.
drum height ≈ ⅓–1 × its radius (Byzantine); much taller in Russian churches
Light a high wall with a half-round window divided by two mullions into three lights, the middle wider, as the Romans lit the great halls of the Baths of Diocletian.
At the end of the apartment of state, in the bedchamber of state, set the state bed: the richest piece in the house, its tester high under the ceiling, its curtains, valances and headcloth of the richest stuff, with the chairs and stools of the room covered to match; it is a bed of honour more than of sleep.
In the formal room, stand the furniture against the walls and leave the middle of the room clear: a pier table (with its glass above) between each pair of windows, the sofa facing the fire, a chair either side of the chimneypiece, the chairs ranged round the walls in a line with the dado, to be brought out when wanted and put back after; and keep each wall symmetrical about its middle, its chimneypiece or its windows.
Give the villa garden porticoes for sun and for shade, grottoes made in imitation of nature with tufa and shells, evergreens planted in straight rows at equal distances, and hedges of box; set vines on columns over the walks.
Lay the ideal garden out on a circular plan in concentric rings, woods outside, then meadows and orchards, then gardens of knots and clipped evergreens divided by walks, with water and the fountain of the goddess at the centre.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The front to the south, each room to its season”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-aspect. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.