There are a lot of factors involved in orientating a home, and chances are your home will face every direction. Contact a local architect to design a home with you. They will analyze your site and position and layout your home accordingly.

Don't get too worried about north orientation. I personally love having our living spaces on the north (and we live in the north!). We get nice natural light all day, and the light is never too harsh (and it very rarely feels too dark, either).

We still have a lot of windows on the south side of the house, so we do get some heat gain in the winter. But those rooms aren't our main living areas, and I am finding that I prefer it that way. In our previous home with a south facing living room, it was often too bright for comfort in the winter (most days we find ourselves reaching to pull the shades).....I never need to pull the shades in our north facing rooms. In a hotter southern climate, I would rather have the living areas face north, anyway. Especially if that is where your views are.

We're in the same place- upstate SC. Most views there are to the north. We were able to angle our house some 30 degrees to the east without really messing up the view. I prefer an angle, as the sunlight hitting the 'north' side of the house will help eliminate algae and mold growth. I agree with letting an architect study the lot and come up with a design for you.

One nice thing about a northern exposure in our climate is that you can have large windows without taking too much of an energy hit. We have good windows (Marvin Integrity), and our house is very energy efficient (ICF). In a more northern climate we'd lose too much heat through all of our windows. In our private setting, we don't even have any window treatments other than the bedrooms.

Upstate SC is a beautiful place- we're on 7 acres near Tigerville.

I think the key here is to not make the house too deep. Something good design should cover anyway, but if you only have area that is one room deep, you get the best of both worlds!

I am in Fl and designed my house so my kitchen/dining and living room are only one room deep. The kitchen part has windows facing north, the dining area of the kitchen faces south and the living room faces both north and south.

To keep the direct sun out of those rooms I have a lanai on the south side. Additionally the south side has 8' high sliders so it gets wonderful light all day long.

Think in terms of the letters H, L,, T or U when designing with the long area facing north/south

built "in", not "on".... :-)

Standards and rules are sometimes meant to be broken. Plan your home so that you are happy; you don't want to miss that view for the rest of you life. We have a similar situation - north Georgia, house will face North because I care mostly about view from my screened-in porch. The South light will fill windows in our "classroom" (we homeschool) and because we will be in the woods surrounded by two creeks, we will definitely need to take advantage of sunlight to prevent as much mildew as possible. With lots of windows, you won't regret breaking the rules a little.

So what does your architect advise?

We also find that a north facing house can be great (and we're in the Pacific Northwest). My parents have a north-facing house, and we're building next door and will have the same as it allows awesome views of several mountain ranges. We were sitting outside at my parents house yesterday afternoon talking about how great it was to be north facing, as we were perfectly comfortable on a 80+ degree day, whereas at our currently south-facing house, we'd be inside to avoid the heat from the direct sun (being Pacific Northwesterners we're pretty much wimps about the heat). As others have said, a great architect should be able to design something that will work well with your site and views.

Here's just one approach for which a north-facing orientation would not be a problem...one of the design keys is to make the major public spaces only one-room deep, with glazing (and views) on more than one side. "L" and "T" shaped houses, with the major public spaces only one room deep, are often very good solutions for challenging sites and orientation. Good luck!

What does my architect advise? I'll let you know what he advises when he makes up his mind (it's me :) ).

I'm an artist and designer by trade and I'm eager to see how far I can take this on my own. I haven't, however, discounted hiring an architect for a consult once I get my needs and ideas straight.

I think I'll have a better feel for the land once we've cleared the site - it's heavily wooded. My gut has already identified the build site as 2-3 feet down (in elevation) and a bit to the East of the highest point of the land, but I've been amazed how 20 feet this way or that can immensely impact the balance and feel of the site.

I've flagged out the perimeter and a meandering, 420ft s-curve for a driveway, something like the attached image, but the perimeter I've marked out in real life is meandering and not the straight lines shown on the image.

In the image, you can also see that I've placed the home (the gray box at the end of the drive, the other gray box is a future shop/garage/barn) oriented slightly to the East of true North, but I'm not sure if I like the idea of approaching from the drive directly toward the corner of the home, so the drive may need to be adjusted.

Thanks again for all your replies, they are very helpful.

We're past the top of the hill, too, I'd say about 75', and maybe 6' or so in elevation. We wanted a walk-out basement, so we built on the slope rather than at the very top. One advantage of this is that you can only see the roof of our house from the street, and from our front porch (looking south with a view of Paris Mountain) we can't see the houses across the street.

If it was my house and site, I'd be looking at the down-hill areas (toward the top of your blue box) and design the house to step down the slope, while maintaining the view. Hopefully you wont' clear any more of the site of trees than absolutely necessary to build. Designing a house which incorporates key existing trees can be a wonderful thing!

Agree with Virgil. I would not be doing any clearing until a preliminary design is complete.

What does my architect advise? I'll let you know what he advises when he makes up his mind (it's me :) ).

I'm an artist and designer by trade and I'm eager to see how far I can take this on my own. I haven't, however, discounted hiring an architect for a consult once I get my needs and ideas straight.

I'm an artist and designer, and designed my house here with the help of the great architects and folks on this forum. And I worked with our builder's draftsman. If I had it to do over, I'd have hired an architect. An architect would have saved me the mistakes I didn't know I was making or that I missed because the draftsman did what worked best for him and the builder.

Things like:

An architect might have designed the support wall so it wasn't part of the staircase wall. That would have allowed me to have a more open staircase like I wanted.

Maybe an architect would have made sure the roof line didn't hit so far up that my windows had to be changed because when the draftsman drew the upstairs windows, he made the headers at 7'8" instead of 6'8" like I wanted.

Maybe an architect would have figured out a way so the stained glass in my stairwell wasn't too high up because of the window issue. (see above)

Maybe an architect would have kept my hallway width to my bedroom at the 42" I kept on insisting on, instead of the 39" wide it is now.

Maybe an architect would have made sure he didn't put another support wall coming from the foyer to the living room so that my bookcases couldn't be open on the side entry like I wanted.

Maybe an architect would have planned out the HVAC before sending the plans to permitting so that I wouldn't have lost a total of 14" x 14" in my guest closet and an additional 14" x 14" in my upstairs linen closet.

Maybe an architect would have specified beforehand that I needed insulation on my bathroom walls and on my mechanical room walls.

Maybe an architect would have noticed that my lanai support beams only came out 7' 8" from the back instead of the 9' I needed and wanted. Now I can't put in an electronic screened lanai.

Maybe an architect would have made sure to specify the stair riser height so it didn't have to be redone with me paying 1/2 the cost because the draftsman specified them at 7 3/4" which is too high for me. Because of this miss, my landing is 2 widths and I now can't put my favorite cabinet in my front hall because the staircase had to be built forward by 5" to add the extra step needed to make the stair risers only 7" high.

If nothing else, I'd run it by an architect if I had it to do over.

Ditto the responses re: one room deep and T or L layouts. This was our concern on our lot too: north-facing view. Our architect mentioned he actually likes north light as it has different colors or attributes than the south that he described, which made me feel better about the orientation. We are still keeping the main living area and kitchen one room deep with south side windows so it can be the best of both worlds. Good luck on your build!

(If you are looking for inspiration, Thomas Bosworth's book "Building with Light in the Pacific Northwest" has several L and T shaped floor plans in it.)

"Agree with Virgil. I would not be doing any clearing until a preliminary design is complete."

Thank you guys for stressing this point... I'm really trying to focus on doing a selective clearing of the site and I've marked many trees that will be kept. This won't be the typical 'moonscape' job that you see so often in new development.

I was under the assumption that I would have to do the clearing first in order to really properly evaluate the site (it's extremely dense and difficult to navigate), but maybe I'm thinking about it backwards. Thanks for that perspective- I'll spend some time there this weekend with that in mind.

We didn't clear our place much at all, other than the home site and driveway. We have mostly mature hardwoods. They do a good job of blocking strong afternoon sun, keeping our place more comfortable. We can't see our mountain view in the summer due to the trees, but it gives us something to look forward to every fall. A view that you see every day loses it's impact after a while.

We have beautiful hardwoods on the downslope from the middle to the rear of the property.

One negative about the land, however, is that we have tons of Virginia Pines at the potential build site and extending to the front of the property. These pines, with their shallow root system, fall so easily and there are scattered fallen pines everywhere on the land.

@mushcreek, did you use someone local to do the clearing, or did you do it yourself? I'm starting to solicit bids based on a 420ft driveway and .5-.75 acres.

We cleared very little outside the footprint. My brother is a surveyor so we tromped through the woods and hacked a lot of stuff by hand, get a feel for naturally less dense areas, etc. We ended up moving things around to nestle the site in between some feature large oak trees.

We're about 3/4 of the way up our entire elevation and we'd flattened a "ledge" into the natural slope to feel "into" the earth and then with a retaining wall, our bedroom at ground level is "up in the trees" based on the view out.

By traipsing around in the woods you CAN get a feel for the space without clearing it. Load up on bug spray.

We do not have your acreage, which changes things, but we did have to do some initial clearing just so that our architect could even get on the site. It was very dense with a lot of thick and high underbrush. The quotes we were getting to do some of the brush work were very high, so we ended up renting a piece of equipment ourselves and DH had a fun weekend playing with the big toy. We kept all the substantial trees, and only cleared all the brush and thin tiny sand pines that were stealing water from the oaks that we want to keep. That gets complicated on a site as large as yours, but just wanted to chime in that sometimes some clearing is helpful to get on the site and properly evaluate the house placement. And, of course, ditto the previous poster re: bug spray - we were attacked!

That's funny; the front of our place was all Virginia pines as well. Nasty, messy trees. Do NOT try to use one as a Christmas tree! I did use someone local, in fact, he's related to the contractor who did our concrete work and coached me on ICF (I did 95% of the house myself). He went to Alaska, though, and I've lost touch with him.We cleared the front approach of the pines, and are trying to turn it into a sunny, pasture-like area. The soil is terrible; I was told it was used to grow cotton, which really strips the soil of everything.

Here's our place today:

my brother lives in montana, near glacier national park, not far from canadian border, his home is extremely large and most of the larger windows face north-towards the biggest mountains while is's not facing north, it's greatest window exposure is north don't hear any complaints from him about it, but the views are fabulous....

@mushcreek, that looks like a great piece of land you have there.

Living in the same area, I can see definitely see the benefits of that orientation, especially if the trees are blocking much of the direct sunlight out of the west. And I like the placement of the barn in relation to the home and driveway.

The Virginia pines are terrible and most will have to go, but even worse are the holly trees and shrubs. They're everywhere, and impossible to kill unless you get them by the roots. It's going to be painful.

Our house also faces noth b/c of he view. We're two rooms deep w/large windows on both sides. Initially I expected the south facing Windows would bring in the light and we'd enjoy the view out of the north side. I ended up being surprised by how much light the north side windows actually bring in -- enough that we had to deepen the color of the walls b/c he light totally washed out our paint choices! Don't fear the North side!