Guides · Windows · 15 min read · Updated September 2026

Windows

The tradition calls windows the eyes of the house and has fewer rules for them than the decorating press suggests, and better ones. The line from the door to the window, the seat under a window and the bed beneath one, the height of a sill, what a window looks at and the Ming gardener’s art of borrowing a view, light on two sides, and the case for opening it every morning.

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Water

Fig. 01 Light through a curtain. The tradition calls windows the eyes of the house, and asks them to be dressed, not shut.

If the door is the mouth of qi, the windows are its eyes, and the tradition treats them as it treats eyes: they should be open by day, closed at night, clear, and looking at something worth seeing. Beyond that its rules for windows are rules about what lies between a window and a door, about what should not be placed under one, and about how many a house should have. Most of the rest is the decorating press, and the best of the rest is a Ming garden manual.

The eyes of the house

The Chinese house the tradition was written for looked inward. A courtyard house, the siheyuan of the north, turned blank walls to the street and opened all its windows onto its own court, so that what the house looked at was what it owned: a tree, a tank of water, the sky above the court, the family crossing it. The windows themselves were lattices of wood, papered on the inside, opened in the day and closed at dusk, and the manuals’ instruction that a window be shut at night and opened in the morning describes a papered lattice before it describes a sash. The yin house, the tomb, has no windows at all, and the manuals say so as a warning: a house that cannot see out is a house of the dead.

The line through the room

Plan 01 Windows: the axis from the door to the window opposite, and the seat, the desk and the bed kept off it The window opposite the door makes a line through the room, drawn dashed with a red arrowhead at the window: the tradition reads it as qi entering and leaving at once, and the body reads it as a draught. Nothing that a person sits or sleeps in stands on it, and the ghosted sofa across the axis is the arrangement the line is drawn against: the desk takes the side window for its light, the seat backs onto the solid wall, and the bed lies across the room with its head to the wall and the window to its side. Curtains are drawn as the tradition wants them, able to close the window at night.

The second rule is the command position seen from the window’s side. A bed with the window behind its head, a desk with the window behind the chair, a sofa under the window: each has glass where the tradition wants a wall, and each puts a person in the draught of the line above. The bed placement and desk placement guides give the order in which to give things up when the room allows nothing else; the short version is that the window at the side of a seat or a bed is what the tradition wants, and the window behind it is what it tolerates with the curtains drawn.

Beside, not under

Fig. 02 Three sills, in section, the window wall at the left and the outside beyond it; the people sit facing into the room with the window at their side. A: a sill at thirty-five centimetres, low enough to sit on with a cushion, makes a window place, the seat in the light that Alexander’s pattern asks every room with a view to have; the seated eye is well above the sill and the whole view is there. B: a sill at ninety, the ordinary height, with a desk beside the window rather than under it; the seated eye at a metre fifteen sees over the sill, and the light comes from the side, which is where the tradition and the desk both want it. C: a sill at a metre fifty above the head of a bed, the one arrangement in which the tradition tolerates a window behind a sleeper, because the wall behind the pillow is wall to above the head and the glass is where no one lies or looks. Below the line of the sleeper it is a bed against a wall; above it, a high window that lights the room without watching the bed. The heights are Alexander’s low sill, thirty to forty centimetres for a window place, and the common building sill of ninety; a sill above a bed head should clear the top of the headboard and the pillow with a hand’s breadth to spare. A window whose sill is below the seated eye gives a view to a person at a desk or a table, and one whose sill is above it gives light only, which is the whole difference between a window one sits beside and a window one sits under.

The height of a sill decides what a window is for. Alexander’s pattern language has two patterns about it and the tradition, without measuring, agrees with both. The first is the window place: a room with a view should have a place to sit in the window, a deep sill or a built seat at thirty to forty centimetres with cushions, a low sill being the pattern that makes it possible, because a person sitting is drawn to the light and a room that gives them nowhere to sit in it leaves them standing. The second is the ordinary sill at ninety centimetres, which a seated eye at a metre fifteen sees over; a desk or a table set beside such a window, not under it, has the light from the side and the view at a turn of the head, which is the arrangement the home office guide draws and the one the tradition’s command position asks for.

What a window looks at

The tradition reads the view from a window as it reads the view from the door: what is seen is what enters. A window that looks at the corner of the next building, a pole, a blank wall a few metres off or a road running at the house looks at sha, and the manuals ask for it to be screened on that side, with a blind, a plant or a slatted panel, while the rest of the window stays open. A window that looks at trees, sky or water looks at what the tradition wants a house to face, and is left alone.

Tradition · Borrowing a view

The finest thing the Chinese tradition says about windows is in a garden book. Ji Cheng’s Yuan Ye of 1631, the Ming manual of garden making, ends with a chapter on borrowed scenery, jiejing: a garden is made not only of what lies inside its wall but of what a window or a gate can be made to frame beyond it, and the gardener borrows from afar, a distant hill; from next door, a neighbour’s tree; from above, the moon and the clouds; from below, a reflection in water; and from the season, blossom in spring and snow in winter. The window is cut to take the borrowed thing and to leave out the rest, which is what the manuals mean when they ask for a bad view to be screened and a good one left open. A window that looks at one tree, well framed, is a better window than one that looks at a street with a tree in it.

Evidence · The view

Ulrich compared the records of forty-six patients who had the same operation in the same Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981, half of them in rooms whose window looked at a stand of trees and half in rooms whose window looked at a brick wall. The tree patients went home three quarters of a day sooner, took fewer strong painkillers and drew fewer complaints from the nurses. The study is small and old and it has been built on since; it is still the clearest evidence there is that what a window looks at is not nothing. Kaplan and Kaplan’s account of why, that a natural view rests the attention a task exhausts, is the psychology behind it. Boubekri and colleagues, comparing forty-nine office workers with and without windows, found that the windowed workers had far more light on them by day and slept about three quarters of an hour longer at night. The tradition’s eyes of the house are the evidence’s daylight and view.

Light on two sides

Alexander’s other pattern about windows is the one the tradition never states and always assumes: a room should have light on two sides. A room lit from one wall has a bright window and a dark opposite wall, and a face seen against the window is a silhouette; a room with a window on a second wall, even a small one, has light from two directions, the shadows are filled and the faces are readable. The classical house had it by its plan, a room opening onto a court in front and a light-well behind. A modern room has it if the house was designed by someone who had read the pattern, and if it has not, the cheapest substitute is a pale wall opposite the window, which throws the light back, and a lamp on the dark side in the evening, which the lighting guide sets out.

Opening it

The tradition’s qi is, among other things, air, and the manuals ask for windows to be opened daily so that the house does not hold stale qi. It is the rule about windows with the most behind it: ventilation is the one variable in this guide that has been measured against carbon dioxide, symptoms and sleep, and the air guide gives those studies with their sizes.

Fig. 03 Two rooms and the air in them. A: windows on two walls, one open on each, and the air crosses the room from one to the other; the room changes its air in minutes. B, ghosted: one window, and the air that comes in turns back at the far wall and leaves by the way it came, so that the middle of the room keeps what it had. Opening the door as well gives the second room two ends. The tradition’s morning rule, open the windows, is a rule about cross-ventilation whether or not the manuals knew the word. Two openings on different walls, or a window and an open door, are what move the air; one window on its own mostly moves the curtain.

The plan shows why the manuals’ instruction, open the windows every morning, is a rule about which windows. A room with an opening on two walls empties in minutes: the air comes in at one and leaves at the other, and the whole room is on its way. A room with one window is harder to change: the air comes in and turns back at the same opening, and the middle of the room keeps what it had. The remedy is the same in both traditions, to open a door as well as the window so that the room has two ends, which is what the drawing’s second room lacks. Alexander’s windows which open wide, casements rather than sashes that lift a hand’s breadth, is the same pattern in the joinery.

Dressing it

The manuals want a window that can be closed: curtains or blinds that make the room dark at night, which is the bedroom’s yin and the sleep research’s dark, and that can be drawn against a view the room does not want. They dislike a window covered permanently, a house that has blinded itself, and a bare window at night, a house that cannot rest. Between the two is the ordinary curtain, opened in the morning and closed at dusk, which is the tradition’s whole instruction and the day’s. A curtain that covers the wall beside the window when it is open, rather than the glass, is the joiner’s version of the same rule: the window by day should be all window.

Checklist

Nothing a person sits or sleeps in on the line from the door to the window
Something between a door and the window opposite: a table, a screen, a plant, a curtain
Bed, desk and seat with the window at their side, not behind; a window behind a bed only if its sill clears the headboard
A low sill with a seat in it where the room has a view
Screen the part of a window that looks at a corner, a pole or a wall; frame the tree
Light from a second wall if the plan allows it, a pale wall opposite if it does not
Opened daily, and a door with it; closed and darkened at night
No skylight over a bed or a stove
Glass in proportion to wall