Planning for light before planning for rooms

The standard way to plan a house is to list the rooms and then fit them to the plot. It is fast, and on a generous site it works. On the deep, narrow plots common across Lucknow it produces the same result every time: a bright front, a bright back, and a dead middle nobody wants to use.

The alternative is to establish where daylight can reach before deciding what goes where. That usually means opening a court, a light well or a double-height slot somewhere in the body of the plan, and accepting that the built area lost is smaller than the usable area gained.

Once the light is placed, circulation should follow it. A corridor along a court is a daylit corridor, and the rooms it serves face something other than a boundary wall. The plan does more work for the same footprint.