What if CT realtors focused on sunlight and orientation rather than features and style?

Photo of Duo Dickinson
She is taking in the last sun rays of the day

She is taking in the last sun rays of the day

Justin Paget/Getty Images

Connecticut is largely a state of homes built from “stock plans” and existing apartment buildings. These designs never consider their sites beyond how cars get in and out, and how septic, water and power are accommodated.

But our homes are fully changed by their orientation to the sun, the wind, and the view. Our homes are dominated by the compass, and we almost never think to pull back and consider where the sun is, where the prevailing breezes come from, or how our rooms are affected by those universal constants.

Instead, we obsess over two things: features and style. Like buying a car, where we can order things like leather seats or a GPS, we look at homes as assembled features. Walk-in closets, attached baths and island kitchen are listed in litanies of real estate agent descriptions. But no matter what features you have in a house, the sun and wind dominate how every room feels and is used.

Similarly, the occasional “light-filled” room description is seldom heard around the style focus of most real estate marketing: “colonial,” “contemporary,” and “arts and crafts” are instant descriptors, unlike how these styles address the sun.

What would it be like if the laundry list of rooms in every real estate agent’s description of a home for sale or apartment for rent listed their rooms’ orientations?

An east-facing dining room would be great in the morning, but dim in the evening. A south-facing living room would be filled with light, but could bake in the summer. How many would be thrilled or turned off by an east-facing bedroom where the sun wakes you up every morning? We often are not given that information, but I think we should be.

Beyond the generic sun orientation, think of the seasons: warming up the home on midwinter mornings with east-facing windows also means baking the home with western light in summer evenings. And no matter how you spin it, the north side of any home has little direct sunlight coming through its walls.

Think of how coastal homes are shown: real estate agents wait for marshes to be filled with high tide, or maximize beach area during low tide. I have never heard of those potential buyer visits being keyed to the sun — for a sunny morning kitchen that faces east, or a fabulous sunset for a west-facing living room.

So the most unchanging, elemental reality of any building — where the sun is — is often ignored when those selling or buying consider a home’s value. You can add a window, a deck, a sunroom, but you can never change where the sun will be in relation to your home. Where your home sits on the compass points should be a baseline consideration when thinking about where you might live, or how you might change where you live.

More variably for each site, the winds are also defined by how a home sits on the compass points. The old expression is that “the west makes the weather.” But where a home sits on the terrain can turn it away from or into the wind. Trees can break the wind, or funnel it. But a southeast-facing bedroom will simply have fewer breezes than a northwest-facing one in the Northeast.

These realities have extreme importance for our decks and porches. South-facing decks can roast their occupants, but north-facing decks can be a mold factory. Sunsets are pretty great from these spaces, so western exposure may be very valuable, unless you face your neighbor’s wall.

Therein lies the mixed message of considering the compass points when considering a home: Each home's orientation sits in a context where the universal realities of sun and wind orientation are defined by what is directly around your home. So looking at a driveway that faces south may be sunny, but is not as valuable as a northern view to a beautiful view.

But it is clear most people do not focus on where the sun and wind come from in their homes until it is too late. They are in their home or apartment and have a life sentence of baking or dim depression.

I think our year of Covid has heightened our sensitivities. As people ask how each room is affected by the sun or wind before they buy or occupy, those selling or renting those spaces will focus on those properties. And as we see how the stock designs are dumped upon unique sites, homeowners that have lived within their homes more than ever before this year may come to register those standard plans to the specifics of the compass.

Duo Dickinson is a Madison-based architect.