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 · Roofs
The porch as an outdoor room
Build a deep porch, eight or nine feet, usually recessed under the main roof, on sturdy posts or piers, big enough to sit and eat in: in summer it is the living room of the house.
The Craftsman bungalow is low and broad, its roof of gentle pitch carried two and a half to four feet beyond the walls on exposed rafters (Stickley scorned brackets that support nothing). The porch lies under that roof, usually recessed into the house, on square posts or piers of stone or brick, and is eight or nine feet deep: not a shelter for the door but a room. The tapered posts on piers and the bracketed gables of the California bungalow came from the builders and the plan books rather than from Stickley.
Sleeping porches, pergolas and terraces carried the same idea further, joining house and garden in a way that the Victorian house, closed against the street, had not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The porch as an outdoor room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/stickley-porch. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.