Problem
If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.
Solution
Place the most important rooms along the south edge of the building, and spread the building out along the east-west axis. Fine-tune the arrangement so that the proper rooms are exposed to the southeast and the southwest sun. For example: give the common area a full southern exposure, bedrooms southeast, porch southwest. For most climates, this means the shape of the building is elongated east-west.
Related Patterns
… according to South Facing Outdoors (105), the building is placed in such a way as to allow the sun to shine directly into it, across its gardens. From Intimacy Gradient (127), You have some idea of the overall distribution of public and private rooms within the building. This pattern marks those rooms and areas along the intimacy gradient which need the sunlight most, and helps to place them so that the indoor sunlight can be made to coincide with the rooms in the gradient which are most used.
When you can, open up these indoor sunny rooms to the outdoors, and build a sunny place and outdoor rooms directly outside - Sunny Place (161), Outdoor Room (163), Windows Which Open Wide (236). Give the bedrooms eastern exposure - Sleeping to the East (138), and put storage and garages to the north - North Face (162). Where there is a kitchen, try to put its work counter toward the sun - Sunny Counter (199); perhaps do the same for any work bench or desk in a Home Workshop (157), Workspace Enclosure (183) …
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 614.