7' windows with 9' ceilings?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m building a new house, and I got a lot of good tips on what to include in a previous post.

Now I have an aesthetics question: would it look horrible to have 7’ high windows in rooms with a 9’ ceiling?

By 7’ high, I mean that’s how high the top of the window is, not necessarily that it has 7 vertical feet of glass. The bottoms of the windows will range from zero feet for the patio doors, to five feet for the bathroom windows (so we don’t have to close the blinds when we’re taking a bath).

We’ll have 2’ eaves, and only one story, so it seems to me that having the windows 8’ high will give us a great view of the overhang, but won’t add any sunlight. And they will let more heat out in the winter, and cost more for blinds and/or curtains, etc., so other things being equal, I’d rather have the shorter windows. But my builder thinks it would be a big mistake for resale value if we have a 2’ space between the windows and the ceiling. We are hoping that we will stay in this house forever, so resale isn’t a paramount concern, but I don’t want to live in an ugly house, either.

My wife and I have both lived in houses with 7’ windows all our lives, and never felt we were missing anything, but we can’t really tell how they would look with 9’ ceilings until we build it (we’ve drawn it in a 3D visualization program, and it looks OK to us there, but of course that’s not the same).

Opinions will be welcomed.

2

I have a room with 6’ windows on 8’ walls. It looks perfectly normal. I think you may be wrong about the eaves blocking light though. We call that room the sun room.

Because that room is one story up and looks into the “back yard” (we have 10 acres in the woods) we set the windows just 6 inches up from the floor.

3

(missed edit)

Re-reading your post I see that that is not what you are describing.

Our windows are 6’ of vertical glass with the top 6’ 6" from the floor.

Sorry.

4

Nothing to apologize for, you answer is relevant, so thank you. The tops of your windows are more than a foot from the ceiling, and you’re happy with it. So I don’t see why my builder insists that more than a foot is too much.

5

So if you wre putting in, say a 15’ cathedral ceiling, he’d want windows up to the rafters there? My brother did 10’ ceilings in his house with standard window tops about 7 1/2’ above floor. Then put narrow shelving for all of SILs collectibles around the room 2’ below the ceiling.