The way a building or home sits and where it faces can drastically affect its value and usefulness. The way a newly built home faces will affect its price point for sale. In some cultures, like in the far east, buyers will go so far as to unyieldingly require specific locations and facing for their homes. This is due to practices like Feng Shui, which assert that the layout of certain elements in a home, as well as the directions it faces, will have an effect on quality of life.
Good orientation, in tandem with other efficiency features, can go so far as reducing the need for HVAC systems, which is not only desirable for the consumer because of conserving expense, but also can helpful for environmental concerns like greenhouse gas emissions.
Because the way a house is built depends so much on the environment in which its built, there’s really no ‘right’ way to build a home in terms of orientation, but it’s important to consider elements like wind and sunlight. With structures that are custom built through architecture firms, the architect designing the home or building will be looking at the land plot to determine how to incorporate things like the climate in which the building is being built, how light will filter through and around the house, and how to incorporate things like this into the structure.
In humid or hot climates that don’t require summer heating, it might be best to build to exclude sunlight. This can be done through planting trees or building structures close to each other.
In colder climates, it’s sometimes preferred to building facing towards the sun, which is a great way to use solar energy to power the home. This is called north orientation and is usually advantageous in climates that require heating during the winter. It’s a way for the home to retain extra solar heat during the winter. This works especially well if a home is surrounded by trees that lose their leaves during the winter. During the winter, the home will get extra light, and during the summer, the home will get shade.
Factors to Consider for the Best Orientation
Firstly, consider the environment and what cooling and heating may be required or preferred. Is there a need for passive heating or cooling? Both? Consider local meteorological records. It’s important to look at the following:
– Humidity ranges
– Ranges in temperature, including diurnal, seasonal and extremes
– Wind directions, considering cold, hot, cooling, and wet
– Surrounding geology and its effect on climate
– Existing landscape and buildings
Building this way has the ability to create temperature variations from one room to the next. This can occasionally be affected through faulty air conditioning; the system may not be working well enough, but this can also be affected through the orientation of the building. Concrete examples of this could be a sheltered space like a laundry room, or a shed, which will likely retain heat longer throughout the day, or a yoga studio with windows that face east, which will have more warm sunlight in the mornings, and cool throughout the day. In some cases, builders will put a restriction on the amount of windows that face either east or west in order to conserve energy, which will reduce costs and increase quality of life.
A home or building’s orientation is a personal and functional aspect to consider. For a hotel or condo building in a commercial area, it might be best for it to face West in the morning so that there is lots of natural light throughout the day and in the afternoons. Views are also affected by orientation, and the better the view of a building, the higher the market value will be.
