LeDeuxions · notes from twenty years on site · 한국어
"I want to live somewhere I can watch the sunset." I understand that completely. A wide west window, the sky going red over dinner — it is a real thing to want. Have you ever put your hand on that wall on a summer afternoon?
There is a house I know with a west-facing balcony. In summer you cannot keep your hand flat against that wall for long. West sun hits a facade directly through the entire second half of the day, and it is strongest late — exactly when the air is already at its hottest.
Concrete and masonry absorb that and hold it. The wall is a battery, and it charges all afternoon. Then the sun goes down and it starts discharging — inward, into your rooms, for hours.
That is why the room does not cool down at night. You can run air conditioning all day and get the air cold, and the wall will still be warm at midnight, quietly handing the heat back. People blame the air conditioner. It is not the air conditioner.
"Can't I just close the curtains?" I get asked this a lot. Curtains block light. They do much less about heat.
Here is the problem. Solar energy passes through the glass first. Once it is inside, a curtain catches it — and now it is trapped between the curtain and the window, heating that pocket of air. More of it ends up in the room than goes back out through the glass. You have moved the heat, not removed it.
The fix has to be outside the glass. External shutters, exterior roller blinds, a brise-soleil, a second skin — the specific choice matters less than the position. It has to stop the sun before it reaches the window.
Someone I know understood this and planned an exterior screen wall from the beginning. Then it got postponed, because it looked "closed in." That was the reason. It stayed postponed for several years.
How did it end? They installed motorised external shading. It cost considerably more than the original screen wall would have. And that is before counting several summers of heat and several summers of electricity bills.
Put the whole number together and it would have been better to build the thing that looked closed in.
Heat is the obvious cost. There is a quieter one. Strong low sun in your eyes for hours every evening does something to how the evening feels — it is tiring, it makes you want to do nothing, and if it happens every day it works on your sleep.
I am not going to overstate this. There is no formal diagnosis here, and I am an architect, not a doctor. But summer lethargy and disturbed sleep in heavily west-facing homes comes up often enough that it is worth saying out loud. People who have not lived in one say "but the sunset." People who have lived in one say "summer is hard."
One thing worth knowing: thirty years ago a west-facing home was not as punishing as it is now, for the simple reason that summers were cooler. That is part of why older clients did not weigh orientation as heavily. The price of west has gone up, and it goes up again every year.
I am not telling you not to love the sunset. I am telling you that if you pick west, put exterior shading in the budget from the start. Not as an upgrade. As part of the building.
If you leave it out, you will not avoid the cost. You will pay it in a few years, with several summers added on top.
In construction there is almost never an absolute — a west-facing house designed properly is a fine house to live in. It is the undesigned west-facing house that charges you every August.
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Written from jobs I worked on, not from a manual.
Small tools I built for everyday work — pdf300.com
And a few things to play with — ledeuxions.com/games