Natural light sells. But delivering it—at scale, on tight lots, under evolving codes—takes more than supersizing openings.
Garrett Hinds, vice president of architecture and design at California- and Colorado-based Trumark Homes, and Jeff Benach, principal at Lexington Homes in suburban Chicago, explain how they design for brightness without creating budget, privacy, or performance headaches.
Start With the Arrival, Not the Aperture
Hinds designs for a “sense of arrival” first, then uses windows to extend space and draw the eye out. “My No. 1 priority with windows is the sense of arrival when I open that front door. I want to see through the house and out to the backyard to make the volume and the space feel as big as possible,” he says, pointing to the great room/kitchen/dining core as the daylight engine of the plan. Clerestories often follow on taller plates to elevate that experience on the second level.
He’s less interested in check-the-box features like skylights, citing long-term waterproofing concerns, and more focused on glass where people live and move. “We don’t do skylights,” he notes. “Just the waterproofing and headaches, long-term issues.”
Credit: Trumark Homes
Bigger Isn’t Always Better: Lessons From the Back Wall
A decade ago, the market fixated on massive multi-panel doors. Hinds has since pivoted. The reason isn’t just price; it’s how rooms actually work. “The big huge [glass wall system] was a big deal,” he says, but the assemblies were expensive, could go out of adjustment, and forced living rooms to grow “from 16 to 19 feet” to maintain circulation. Trumark now favors 8-foot sliders paired with window-scaping” above the couch line. The result: more light, views, and furniture-friendly walls.
That practical lens extends to buildability. Hinds standardizes sizes and avoids large factory-mulled units that complicate logistics. “We’d rather have smaller individual windows arranged … so you still get a good clean look, but you can weatherproof each window separately.”
Credit: Miller + Miller Architectural Photography for Lexington Homes
Tight Lots, Real Privacy
On narrow side yards, Hinds designs for privacy, then fine-tunes in the field. He avoids defaulting to small, high-placed windows or obscure glass when he can solve sightlines with placement. “I’ll design the homes thinking about privacy, and during frame walk we’ll move windows to assure privacy,” he says, describing a recent set of tall, skinny homes, 8 feet apart, where a bedroom window near a closet shifted to protect dressing areas without sacrificing daylight.
Benach faces a different density challenge: three-story townhomes where only end units get exposure on three sides. The answer has been more glass where it counts. In a re-engineered townhome line, Lexington enlarged the windows in some elevations, nearly doubling glass surfaces, and replaced a sliding balcony door with a single swing door flanked by a continuous run of windows above the kitchen work zone, netting more daylight and more cabinet wall. Buyers noticed. “The amount of light coming in and the largess of the windows is a draw,” he says.
Municipal light and vent requirements reinforce those choices. In suburban Chicago, Benach says villages routinely verify minimum natural-light percentages by room, sometimes triggering window adjustments during entitlement.
Codes, Climate—and When to Skip the Shade
Neither builder leads with complicated exterior shading. Sites in California often dictate home orientations, Hinds notes, making textbook solar control tough to apply consistently across 100-lot phases. Daylight decisions generally favor views and feel and rely on envelope detailing to manage heat gain. “We can still make windows look good and they function better and it’s a tighter house with more glass,” he says, pointing to hard-sealed shear around the openings, careful fastener choices, and a move away from recessed windows to limit wind-driven rain.
In premium-view communities with western exposure, Hinds admits there’s a line where the sunset wins. “I’ve got glass everywhere,” he says of bay-view homes, but late-day heat is a reality; buyers choose how to manage it because they’re paying for the panorama.
The Sales Impact of Daylight
Lexington’s daylight-forward townhomes didn’t just look brighter on paper; they moved quickly in the field. In Morton Grove, Ill., Benach says the community sold the 89 units in 8–10 months with prices rising more than $100,000 during the run-up. He won’t credit daylight alone—location and market conditions mattered—but he’s confident the larger glazing packages helped prospects feel the difference the moment they walked in.
Culture Matters: Designing for Who’s Buying
In several Northern California communities, Hinds says a growing share of buyers follow Vaastu Shastra, the Indian tradition that prioritizes home orientation and room placement. “A lot of our buyers care deeply about where the house faces,” he notes. “North and east exposures are preferred; a south-facing front door can be a deal-breaker.”
That preference shows up during home tours. “People show up with a compass,” Hinds says. “They want to confirm the door and key rooms land in the right quadrants.” To meet demand, his team adjusts where the plan allows: flipping entries on certain lots, nudging room locations, and confirming alignments during frame walks. “I even brought in a Vaastu expert for a prototype so we could understand how orientation affected buyer confidence.”
The design work still starts with experience. “My No. 1 priority with windows is the sense of arrival—seeing through the house to the yard to make the volume feel as big as possible,” Hinds says. Vaastu layering comes next: placing a flex/prayer room or primary suite toward favored exposures and standardizing a few Vaastu-aligned elevations the team can repeat across phases. The payoff: fewer redesigns, faster decisions—and homes that feel right the moment buyers step inside.
