This wall was built in the shape of a bay when the house was built. That is architecture, not a window — and set into it were four independent double-hung windows, each in its own frame, each divided by grilles.
So the kitchen looked at its garden through four frames, four sets of sashes and something like forty small panes of glass. Everything in the room was pointed at that view and almost none of it arrived.
Nothing structural was wrong. Nothing needed opening up. What it needed was a different decision about what went in the opening — which is the part of this job worth showing.
Four double-hung windows, and between them the frames that made them four windows rather than one. Add a meeting rail across each sash and a grille pattern over every pane, and the garden arrives in pieces.
Fixed Picture Windows — one wide light across the middle where two windows and the frame between them used to be, and one in each angled return. The bay shape of the wall is untouched — it is still the same three-sided opening the builder framed. What changed is that you can now see through it.
Every light in it is a fixed Picture Window, and that is the decision rather than a side effect of it. A Picture Window has no sash to slide, no check-rail across the middle and nothing obstructing the view, because it does not open. A window that does open needs the sash and the rail, and those were the things standing in the view.
The four that came out barely opened anyway. There is a counter and a sink in front of that wall, and reaching across it to push a bottom sash up — or to pull a top sash down — is awkward enough that in practice nobody does it. Those windows could open. They were not being opened.
The kitchen ventilates through the windows on the left side of the room, which are reachable. So this wall gave up nothing it was actually using and spent all of itself on glass instead. On a wall with no other way to let air in, we would have specified it differently — that is the point of looking at the room before ordering anything.
The same frame, the same cabinets, the same fabric on the valance. Only the glass is different, and it is the whole room.
No wall was opened. No header was needed, no engineer, no permit, no second day. The opening the builder framed is the opening that is there now.
That is worth saying because the other job we have photographed is the opposite — a wall cut open for a Bay Window over two days, with an engineered header and a permit. Both are the right answer to the house that got them. The part you are paying a Project Designer for is knowing which one you are looking at, and saying so before anything is ordered.
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