The morning sun casts a warm glow on the bedroom ceiling on our straw bale home

Something I’ve become very aware of over the last number of years is my deep craving for natural lighting, and access to sunlight in general. This becomes especially apparent to me when I’m in a home that has poor solar orientation, or during the winter when sunlight is naturally less abundant. Unless I can see and feel the sun on me when I wake up, for example, I’m much more likely to feel drowsy and lethargic in the morning hours. Something I’m very happy about with our straw bale house that we built in Missouri is the abundance and quality of light in the home interior.

Importance of Natural Light in Your Home Interior

Like I said above, I need sunlight to feel active, inspired, and awake. Something I struggle with in our temporary living situation right now is that our living space gets little or no morning light, thanks to the mountain ridge to the south of the house. In fact, the sun barely creeps into the house at any point in the day. No doubt, living in and around the foothills and mountains poses more siting issues than the open prairie. Regardless of where you are, the most important thing to consider is your siting if you want a nicely lit interior. Seems obvious, right? Like any issue of building design, you need to weigh each desire against every other need, however.

This is especially important for anyone that wants to live with minimal electricity. There is little I dislike more than turning on a light during the daytime hours, especially in the morning. Psychologically, it feels awful to me when the main light source is an electric bulb instead of the sun, even if the sun is obscured by clouds. (I bet you can tell just how important bright mornings are to me and my routine.)

In whatever future home we design and build, both abundant sunlight and minimal/zero electric lighting needs will both be major considerations. Something to balance this need against is thermal efficiency, too — if you have too many windows, that’s a huge loss in energy efficiency and comfort during the changing seasons.

The passive solar guideline of putting most of your glass on the south, a little on the east, less on the west, and very little on the north is a good one. If you want to get really scientific about it, you can determine the exact area of glazing you should install to achieve “true” passive solar status. But I digress. The guideline is a good one, and definitely compatible for harnessing excellent natural light as well.

Quality of Light = Quality of Life

Ultimately, I think the quality of indoor light is a quality of life issue. An ill-lit, dark, or otherwise gloomy interior can have significant effects on how you feel. That much should be obvious, but then again some people think office buildings or schools without windows was/is a good idea, too. The classic A Pattern Language has plenty to say about locating windows, the size of windows, and how to make a space more inviting through appropriate lighting.

It should also be considered how the changing of light over the course of both a day and the year is a spectacle in and of itself. It’s very hard to appreciate this very simple phenomenon in a conventional house, one that’s built with little or no regard for the direction of the sun (or any other natural elements, for that matter). But it is truly an enjoyable thing.

Take, for example, the upstairs bedroom space in our straw bale house. It features a rather large east-facing window (a little too big, almost), and it’s the first window in the whole house to admit light. The color of sunlight changes subtly depending on the day, and it’s a very gentle and natural wake-up call that has yet to fail to wake me up. It’s a great feeling, and it’s beautiful to watch the colorful glow of the sun on the walls and ceiling as the sun rises higher.

Another example is this — it’s only during certain times of year that the interior north wall downstairs gets direct light through the west window. This fall, I noticed a truly pleasing effect of the setting sun around this small window on that wall. The clay plaster was literally glowing with soft light for several minutes, at a very specific time during the waning of the sun, and it just felt so good. It’s hard to explain, but the effect gave the house more life in some way. It was beautiful.

The very specific and colorful “glow” on this north wall only happens during a certain time of year, during a certain time of day

I encourage you to think about how to harness natural light in your home interior for the benefit of not just energy efficiency, but a certain quality of life that is hard to achieve in any other way.