East: first light, low and level
The east window's hour is early. The sun comes up low and the beam arrives almost level, the same flat angle that makes a west room hard at five o'clock, except this time it lands on the breakfast bench. In midsummer it starts before six and it means it. In midwinter it arrives later, further round toward the north, and it is welcome.
What makes east easier than west is what the house has been doing all night. The building is at its coolest, the beam is short-lived, and by mid-morning the sun has climbed off the glass and gone about its day. Heat is rarely the complaint on this side. Glare is, and sleep is.
The morning setting: tilt down, then get out of the way
Blades tilted down send that low beam at the floor instead of your eyes, so the room keeps its daylight and loses the dazzle across the bench and the table. An hour or two later, with the sun up and off the window, the same blades open flat and the room goes back to being an ordinary bright room. It is the west trick in reverse, and it costs you nothing but a nudge of the rod.
A level beam at breakfast time. Tilted down, the blade puts it on the floorboards instead of in your eyes.
East bedrooms, and the limit worth knowing
An east bedroom wakes you whether you asked it to or not, and in a town with plenty of shift work that is a real problem rather than a charming one. Here is the honest limit: shutters will take a bright room down to a dim one, but dim is not dark. With the louvres shut, what still gets in is edge light, thin lines at the top and bottom of each blade.
So if somebody in your house sleeps through the morning properly, we will say so standing at the window rather than after the invoice. On that one window the answer is a blockout blind behind the panels: the blind does the dark, the shutters do the look, the daytime and the airflow.
South: the aspect with almost no sun in it
A south wall in this valley barely sees the sun. For most of the year nothing direct reaches it at all, and around midsummer it catches a graze of low sun early and late, which is the extent of it. What it gets instead is soft, even light all day and no glare worth naming.
So on the south side the shutter is not a shading device. The job is privacy, a little draught control, and how the room looks. Blades can sit open most of the day and most of the year, which is the cheapest advice we ever give.
Where a south room does ask something of you is winter. It never gets a warm hour, and the glass is the coldest surface in it. Closing the panels and the louvres at dusk holds a layer of still air against that glass and takes the edge off a cold night.
What this means for the fit-out
- On east glass, keep the tilt easy to reach. This is a window you adjust daily, so 63 or 89 mm louvres are worth it: more blades across the opening means finer control of a low beam. See the blade width guide.
- On south glass, choose on looks. There is no shading penalty to weigh up, so wide 114 mm blades and their bigger view can win on taste alone. This is the one aspect where the catalogue gets a vote.
- Spend where the light is hard. If a whole house is more than this year can carry, the west rooms and the east bedrooms are where the money does work. The south rooms can be the plain ones.
Two aspects that need thinking about, two that mostly need leaving alone. That is the compass doing your sorting for you.
Work through your own house room by room with the Aspect Planner, or go straight to a free in-home measure and we will read the compass with you.