Let the sunshine in! Natural light is an essential component of a well-designed home. It illuminates our living spaces and has numerous health benefits, including improving our mood, enhancing cognitive function, and regulating our sleep-wake cycles. Incorporating natural light into your home design can help you create a more comfortable, inviting, and healthy living environment.

Country Classics, a premier custom home-builder in New Jersey, is happy to share practical tips and design strategies for maximizing natural light in your home, from window placement to reflective surfaces and open floor plans. 

Benefits of Natural Light in Your Home

Natural light has numerous benefits for human health and well-being. Your body doesn’t know the difference between natural light while you are outside and the sunlight that reaches you indoors. The practice of thoughtful use of natural light during home design is called daylighting. Here are some reasons to consider natural light during house design.

To Your Health

Natural light boosts vital body systems. Natural light is an excellent source of vitamin D, which helps maintain healthy bones and teeth, supports immune function, and regulates mood. Exposure to natural light boosts your mood and general sense of well-being via the release of serotonin, a feel-good chemical. 

Rest Like a Champion

Exposure to natural light during the day can help regulate our circadian rhythm, leading to better sleep at night. Exposure to natural light helps your brain understand when to expect to be awake, and waning light cues your body to rest.

Do Your Best Work

Intentional natural light is especially important in your workspaces, such as a home office. Natural light in your home can improve focus, productivity, and overall cognitive performance, making it an ideal lighting source for work and learning environments. 

Energy Savings

Incorporating natural light into your home or office can also save you money on energy bills by reducing the need for artificial lighting during the day. Why pay for what nature provides for free? 

Ways to Bounce Natural Light Through Your Home

By incorporating these design strategies in your Frenchtown home, you can maximize the amount of natural light in your home and create a brighter, more inviting space that feels as good as it looks. Here are some of our top design tips to bounce natural light through your existing home.

• Install reflective surfaces- Mirrors, shiny floors, and glossy surfaces can reflect natural light and help it bounce around your home. Don’t forget about your floors and other horizontal spaces like countertops. Their reflective powers make a big difference in your space!

• Use light-colored paint- Painting walls, ceilings, and floors in light colors can help reflect light making your home feel brighter and more spacious.

• Install sheer window treatments- Sheer curtains or blinds can help filter natural light and distribute it more evenly throughout your home. Doubling up sheer window treatments and heavier blackout curtains provides options for every occasion, so you can sleep until noon and let the sunshine in the moment you awake. 

• Place furniture strategically- Your large furniture can absorb light or keep it from entering in the first place. Avoid placing large furniture in front of windows or in areas that receive a lot of natural light. Instead, position furniture to capture the pools of light you’ve created for cozy comfort.

Maximizing Natural Light While Building a Home

There are various ways you can design a home to make the most of natural light. Choosing a floor plan for your custom home is a unique opportunity to design with natural light in mind. Though you can always add a window or upgrade a feature later, designing something ideal the first time is always cheaper.

Layout

Your home’s biggest opportunity for maximizing available light is realized during design. You have several good options to maximize the sunlight available in your custom home. Creating an open floor plan with fewer walls and partitions allows natural light to flow throughout the home. Positioning living spaces, such as the kitchen and living room, in the center or south side of the home can augment your daylighting efforts. Incorporating glass doors, such as French or sliding glass doors, can increase the amount of natural light entering your home while still providing privacy. Check out our new homes in Frenchtown for great examples of layouts that support natural light.

Home and Window Placement

A house with a long south-facing axis has the best opportunity to capture sunlight. Place ample windows on the south side of your home. In the northern hemisphere, windows facing south receive the most natural light throughout the day. Consider using floor-to-ceiling windows or installing multiple windows in a single room where the sun from the south is unobstructed.

Consider the sun's angle throughout the day and place windows accordingly to allow natural light to enter at different times. For example, east-facing windows will receive morning sun, while west-facing windows will receive afternoon sun.

Create Opportunities for Sunshine

As a general rule, more windows mean more sunshine, but this isn’t always possible. If your home design is narrow, or other features on your lot prevent it from receiving ample natural light, consider adding a light well or atrium in the center of your home to allow natural light to reach more areas. Skylights and solar tubes can also be great methods to capture natural light from above.

Have more questions about building your home in New Jersey? Check out Country Classic’s FAQs.

Country Classics Builds Beautiful, Sun-Soaked Homes in New Jersey

Country Classics is an award-winning home builder in New Jersey that prides itself on creating exceptional homes with a personal touch. We’d love to hear more about the beautiful home you’ve got in mind and put our expertise to work to make it real for you. Tell us more about your custom home plan today!