Which Rooms Should Face North In an Australian Home

North is good for almost every room, not just the living areas. It brings winter warmth, daylight and drying sun wherever it reaches, so the real aim is to get as much of the house as you can onto the northern side.

This is where the size of the block changes what is possible. On a larger block, or a rural property with frontage to spare, do not stop at the living areas. Take advantage of the room and line up the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living and even the wet rooms along the north as well. A home where nearly every room faces north is better than one where only the living areas do, so if the block lets you do it, do it.

When the block will not let you face everything north, and most blocks will not, you have to choose, and the living areas win every time. The kitchen, dining and family rooms are where you spend your waking daylight hours, so they gain the most from the low winter sun and the summer shade.

So the rule for a tight block is simple. If you can only get a few rooms onto the north, make sure they are the living rooms, and put the alfresco and the main yard on the north beside them. Get that right and you have captured most of the benefit of orientation, even if nothing else in the house faces north.

It is tempting to banish the wet rooms to the cold south side to save the north for nicer spaces, but that is a mistake if you can avoid it. Bathrooms and laundries benefit from northern sun as much as any room, because the warmth and the extra UV help them dry out and hold mould at bay.

Anyone who has lived with a south facing bathroom that never sees the sun knows how quickly it goes damp and mouldy. So when you have the northern frontage to spare, give some of it to the wet rooms too. They are not rooms to sacrifice by default, only rooms to move aside when something more important needs the space.

A couple of rooms really are better off out of the sun, and these are the ones you place on the south and west by choice, where they double as a buffer that shields the rest of the house from the harsh low afternoon sun.

The garage is the clearest. Cars do not care about the sun, so the garage belongs on the south or the west. A study or home office is the other one, and it is the room people get wrong. A room full of screens wants steady, even light with no glare, and direct north sun across a monitor is exactly the glare you are fighting, so a study is genuinely happier on the cool south side. A media room or home theatre wants darkness, so it is content tucked away too. Almost everything else in the house prefers the north if you can give it.

Bedrooms enjoy north like most rooms, but they sit lower on the priority list than the living areas, because they are used mainly at night. If you have north to spare once the living areas are sorted, a bedroom will happily take it.

The orientation bedrooms particularly like is east. An east facing bedroom catches the gentle morning sun and wakes you softly, and because it is not in heavy use through the afternoon it dodges the worst of the day's heat. So on a generous block, aim the bedrooms north or north east, and keep only the garage and the study deliberately out of the sun.