Clear advantage – window & door ideas to transform your home

Traditional houses weren't really about celebrating generous expanses of glazing – yet nothing improves a home, nor the well being of its inhabitants, more than interiors flooded with natural light.

These savvy renovations deliver on sunshine, indoor-outdoor connectivity and much, much more – all by clever utilisation of windows and glass doors.

1. Outside the square

Assembledge+

This renovation takes open indoor-outdoor connections to the extreme with window panels sliding/stacking completely outside the footprint of the house.

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2. Follow the sun

Barry Connor Design

Designer: One of our key design strategies was to cluster the main living spaces along the trajectory of sunlight, maximising natural light and creating optimal living conditions. 

Bespoke timber doors and windows, from NZ Doors, facilitated this optimisation of sunshine into the interior.

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3. Glass on the park

Bryant Alsop Architects

While this rear addition works harmoniously with its original traditional 1896 home, it also breaks out into massive walls of glass – connecting with the backyard and borrowing verdant views from the adjacent park.

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4. A little light reading

Weian Lim, WALA

This expansive front window is positioned to make the most of the orientation of the sun to the existing home. 

It is further optimised by the inclusion of a human-size sitting sill – for this lad it's as close as you get to reading outdoors without the wind turning your pages.

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5. Throwing shadows

JMAC Architecture

Your new windows and glazed doors don't have to stand alone.

Here, a combination of multiple sliding screens and over-the-wall glazed sliders, the latter from the APL Residential + Architectural collections, ensure a natural flow for embracing indoor-outdoor living – complete with inviting shadow play.

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6. Cooking with glass

Sandbox Studio

Can there be better multi-functional advantages of a window than being employed as a window splashback? If there's a garden outside, it's pretty and (given the seasons) ever-changing – informing the look of the kitchen; and last but definitely not least a window splashback throws natural task lighting onto your work surfaces.

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7. Bi-fold bliss

Baastudio Architecture

A fully glazed double sliding door, bi-fold doors, and stacking doors, from Allkind, open this gracious extension up to the wider world – having a corner completely free of any fenestrations whatsoever is particularly appealing.

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8. Best of both worlds

Creative Arch

A glass partition wall between living and media rooms creates separate spaces but celebrates the rooms' combined volume in visual terms.

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9. Curvaceous presence

McMahon and Nerlich

The defining feature of this modest house is a curved glass courtyard corner accessed by sliders – the curve is echoed on an interior wall.

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Story by: Trendsideas