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 living room at the heart of the house
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.
Stickley wanted the house planned for the life of the family rather than for visitors. The living room, the largest room, took the place of both the Victorian hall and the parlour (the reception hall, he wrote, is in most Craftsman houses little more than a nook in the living room, though a small entrance hall is kept where draughts are feared); its fireplace, often in an inglenook with a seat either side, was its centre. The dining room opened from it, sometimes through a wide opening with a bookcase or a seat to either side, so that the two rooms read as one space.
Built-in furniture saved space and money and was part of the house’s construction rather than something added to it. The bedrooms were kept to one side or upstairs, with the bathroom between them.
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.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The living room at the heart of the house”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/stickley-living-room. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.