Double Storey Window

A feature that is becoming more popular with modern building designs and self-builds is the double height window. Large windows, often replacing the whole wall of a building can be seen on many architect designed and self build homes.

Placing a window on the ground floor in 3D Architect and then simply changing the properties to make it say 6m tall won't give you the desired effect. This is because the window will automatically be trimmed down to the ceiling level of the ground floor by the upper floor.

The effect we want to achieve is this:

1) Firstly open the project with the building you wish to add a two storey window to. For this you can either create a new building, use one of your existing buildings or download one of our example projects.

I am going to be using our existing example basic building for this guide. If you are creating a building from scratch then you can skip the section where we delete a wall by simply drawing in only 3 walls to start with.

2) Make sure you are in Construction Mode (F12 toggles between Design mode and Construction mode)

3) Now we need to know how we can create a window which is higher than the floor-to-floor height on our individual floors. The way we are going to do this is by using multiple buildings feature of 3D Architect.

4) As mentioned above this guide is written assuming you are using the example basic building. So our first task is to remove one whole side of the building. To do this we need to remove the south facing wall from each floor.

5) Select the floor named Attic either from the drop down list on the toolbar or by navigating to Floor>Current Floor>Attic. Click on the south facing wall to select it (it should now be highlighted in red). Press Delete. Your wall has been removed. Repeat this for the Upper Floor and Ground Floor

6) You should now have a three sided house, complete with roof. Within 3D Architect it is always important that a room be 'closed' correctly. This means that all of the walls link to form a complete room. You will notice when you have completed a room that it gets a label (e.g. Room 1). Because we have just removed an entire side of our house, none of our rooms are currently complete.

7) When is a wall not a wall? When it's a virtual wall. We use the virtual wall type to enable us to close off a room without having a physical wall in place. This is a useful tool when creating designs and structures using multiple buildings.

8) OK so from the wall tool, move your mouse over until the flyout menu appears and shows the available options. Select the Virtual Wall type (easily identified as it's the only wall type that is red).

9) Make sure you have the Attic floor selected again. Now draw a virtual wall across the gap where you earlier deleted the physical wall, making sure you are connecting the east and west walls with this new virtual wall. Your will know when you have connected the walls correctly as your room will be labelled 'Room 1'. Repeat this for the Upper Floor and the Ground Floor. Take not to work from the top floor down. If you complete the ground floor first the roof will automatically fall to the completed floor.

10) We are now ready to insert our second building. So navigate to Building>New Building and hit OK (feel free to change the name if you require). You should now be looking at the Floor Properties dialogue box. Now our new building isn't actually going to be a full building. In fact we're just going to create a single wall to replace the wall we deleted. The difference is that in order for our window to be able to reach from floor to roof, we place our new building as a single floor. This means we need to set the Floor to Floor Height to be the same as the combined height of our origincal building. In our example, this would be 5.6m (2x 2.8m). Once the height has been set hit OK

11) Now we just need to draw a wall back into the hole. This generally works best if you draw your new wall to link the outside edges of the east and west walls. Now your wall is in place we have a four sided house again.

You are now free to add your favourite window type and extend it to the required size. In the case of our example I used the Advanced Window type and set the Sill Height to 0 and the left/right heights to 4m with a 1m arch.