Sized to the sun's path, a deep eave holds the high summer sun off the glass and lets the low winter sun slip underneath - one detail doing two opposite jobs, without a moving part. The Eave That Sorts the Seasons
The most useful number in subtropical design is the one most people never see: the height of the midday sun. In January it sits almost directly overhead. By July it has dropped nearly fifty degrees lower in the sky, sliding in from the north at a long, flat angle.
A well-cut eave reads that difference. Sized correctly to a north-facing opening, it holds the high summer sun off the glass entirely - and then lets the low winter sun pass straight underneath, deep into the room, across the floor. The eave is not a sunshade. It is a filter that sorts the seasons, working hardest precisely when you have forgotten it is there.
Get the geometry right and a single detail does two opposite jobs without a moving part. Borrow the depth from a photograph rather than from the sun path, and the home is either glaring in February or dim and cold in July.
Turned to the north and sheltered from the cool southerly, the courtyard becomes the warmest, most-used room in the house through the cooler weeks - with no roof and no running cost. The Courtyard Changes Its Job
A protected outdoor room earns its keep twice over - by being two places at once. The summer sun sits almost overhead through the middle of the day, so one half of the courtyard sits under cover: shaded, breezy, out of the western glare. The winter sun swings low across the north, so the other half is left open to the sky, with nothing tall on its northern edge, to let that low sun drop straight in.
You move across the space as the season turns - under cover when the sun is high, out in the open when it sits low. One courtyard, two rooms, a few steps apart.
An eave is not there to block the sun. It is there to decide which sun gets in.
— Brett McDonald, Principal Architect
A subtropical home is built to breathe. The openings that draw the summer breeze are the ones that matter most in winter - when the design intent is the ability to close down and hold a warm afternoon once the sun drops. Learning to Close
A subtropical home is built to breathe. Open plans, louvres, sliding walls - the whole design is about letting air move through, and in summer that openness is the point.
In winter it can become the problem. A home that can only ever be open is a home that cannot hold a warm afternoon once the sun drops. The detail that matters is the ability to close down: glazing that seals rather than merely slides, a living zone that can be shut off from the larger volume, a plan that lets you warm the room you are in rather than the whole house.
There is a quieter ally here too. Sunlight allowed onto a concrete floor through a winter morning is stored in the slab and released slowly into the evening - warmth banked while the sun is up and spent after it has gone. The mass we work to shade in summer becomes, with the right exposure, a gentle radiator in winter.
None of this asks for a different kind of house. It asks for a home designed to the full year rather than to its busiest part - one that knows when to open and when to close, which sun to keep out and which to invite in. Comfort on this coast is easy to mistake for a summer achievement. The homes that get it right are simply paying attention to the season nobody photographs.
Comfort on this coast is easy to mistake for a summer achievement. A home designed to the whole year is as settled in July as it is in January. Designing a Home for the Whole Year?
The best coastal homes are comfortable in February and in July without working against themselves. If you are planning a new home or a considered renovation, we design to the whole calendar - the sun path, the prevailing winds, and the way you will actually live across the seasons.
