Picture windows are fixed (they don’t open), which means more glass, fewer frame lines, and the best energy performance of any style — nothing to leak air.

They’re perfect for framing a view, flooding a room with daylight, and pairing with operable windows on either side for ventilation.

Before & After

A wall of frames, or a wall of view.

This room looks onto a back deck and a garden, and for years it looked at them through a grid: three rows of small panes in heavy wood frames, with a bar crossing the view every few inches. The homeowners had learned to look around it. Four tall lights went into the same curved wall, and there is nothing left to look around.

A curved wall of windows divided into three rows of small panes by heavy wood frames, the back deck and garden beyond broken up by the grid — Before. Three rows of small panes, and a frame across the view every few inches.

The same curved wall after: four tall Picture Windows running nearly floor to ceiling, the deck, the table and the garden visible without a bar crossing them — After. Four tall lights in the same curved wall.

And from the street

A different house, and the same decision made smaller. Two double-hung windows with a frame down the middle became one Picture Window in the same first-floor opening.

One house, side by side. Left: two double-hung windows in the first-floor opening, divided by a frame in the middle and a rail across each sash. Right: the same opening with a single large Picture Window and no divisions in the glass. — Left, before: two double-hung windows. Right, after: one Picture Window in the same opening.

And from the chair

The same kind of opening from inside. One pane, no rail across the middle and no frame down it — so what you get is the street, the trees and the light, rather than four pieces of them.

Looking out through a Picture Window from inside a room: a single unbroken pane of glass holding a mature tree, a clipped hedge, the road and a neighboring house, with no frame or rail crossing the view

One of these is written up in full: a kitchen that looked at its garden through forty small panes, redesigned and finished in a day, with the before and after from both sides of the wall.