Discover Windows / The Window as an Object

The Window Seat, and Why We Never Tire of It

Occupy the thickness of the wall and you invent the best seat in the house.

The window seat is probably the most consistently loved detail in domestic architecture, and its appeal is easy to explain once stated. It puts you inside the opening rather than in the room looking at it. You get maximum light and maximum outlook while sitting in a small enclosed pocket, which satisfies two apparently contradictory human preferences at once: the desire for prospect, to see out and across, and the desire for refuge, to be tucked into something with your back protected.

It also solves a social problem. A window seat lets one person be alone in company. You can be in the room, present and available, while being unmistakably in your own place, half turned to the outside. Very few pieces of built furniture manage that, and none manage it as cheaply, since the seat is essentially made of wall thickness that was going to exist anyway.

The same logic scales down. A wide sill deep enough to sit sideways on, a bench built into a bay, a step up to a low opening: all of them produce a version of the effect. What they have in common is that they treat the opening as a place rather than a hole, and any room that contains such a place tends to have that place occupied whenever the sun is out.