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.
Plan for the sun
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.
Parker and Unwin argued that a house was too often planned to look well from the road, its front parlour facing the street whatever the sun. They asked that the plan begin from the sun: the living room facing south and south-west, with sunlight in it through the day and windows on two sides; a study or breakfast room to the east or south-east; the kitchen to the north-east or east and the larder to the north; and the garden on the same side as the sun, whichever side the road might be.
The rule went with their wish for one large living room in place of several small ones, and passed into the garden cities and the public housing of the twentieth century.
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.
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.
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, “Plan for the sun”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/unwin-aspect. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.