It will demand more of your HVAC designer so use a good one.

Get into planning stages with an architect.

The only way a house can only have a southern exposure is to be located on the north pole.

never said it only has southern exposure. looking to see if people like what I would call a sunroom style living room. Got the architect.

The sun rises over the mountains about 4:30 in the morning in the summer and blazes into my "sunroom like living room." Its a lifestyle choice, I guess.

Where are you located?

we're in N.E. ohio.
We love the idea of natural light and view of our woods behind us but just want to make sure there's nothing we might regret.

Is this a 'living room' or 'family room'? Allot of houses still have both, IMO, a living room is a waste of space and money. You will have allot of windows, make sure you get the best insulated for your area. You might look into geo for HVAC if you can afford.

I've always called it our living room... we only have one, so family room?

Doesn't really matter what you call it. Living room in my area is generally the second of the rooms if you have both. Typically a more formal space (which is ironic given the name) and not used that much any more. In stock house plans, these have been changed to offices.

We have a great room that is taller (sloped roof to 14) and has the most windows. It does tend to be colder than other areas of the house - and we are in NC. It also has nothing above it where the rest of the downstairs has a second floor on top. Some things are hard to HVAC (and window) away. You can have the space on its own system but it depends what you are doing for HVAC to see if that makes sense.

We have a gas fireplace in our great room that gets used to heat the room up. Our house is tight enough that we often don't run heat very much. Since we don't even run the heat, it is hard to "HVAC" away the cold factor. You could with a mini-split just for that room - but in our case, the fireplace does the job quite well.

So what are you using for heat?

we'll have a gas furnace, there will be a fireplace as well. I thought about the minisplit, perhaps a ducted in the basement.
but with gas available makes it harder to justify i guess

Josh - While I don't have a great room with exterior walls on three sides, I do have a small sunroom 8.5x10 that has been converted to my office during COVID that has 3 exterior walls with east / south / west exposure. I do find the temps and light in that room are different than the rest of the house. Mostly, I find it is warmer and significantly brighter, for reference I am in Western Mass. I am sure part of the reason is the small space and numerous windows as there are 6! There are a couple of times I have noticed it difficult to occupy the space, in the peak of summer the afternoon sun can make the room almost uncomfortably warm and found that I needed to relocate on very warm days as early as 2:00 pm. This past fall, I found the lower sun position created sharp glares that made it challenging to work on a computer screen - I would think a TV would be just as difficult. I did remedy the low sun with good light blocking shades, but needed to keep them drawn from 2 pm until dusk from October on. Hope this information is somewhat helpful.

I agree with @devonfield. Your issue will be with the TV and glare, not HVAC. Expect that room to be warm in the winter due to passive solar. In the summer - that all depends on your overhangs and whether you have landscaping/deciduous trees that shade your house. If you don't have those, then it will probably get a bit toasty in the summer as well. For reference, I'm in MN. Our house is long and narrow - only 1 room wide - so our living room and master bedroom have 3 exterior walls. Both have large south facing windows. Both rooms get very warm in the winter (on sunny days). The sun comes 15 feet into our house this time of year and we have 8 ft ceilings. I haven't noticed a difference in the summer, but we're shaded by ridiculously huge trees. If you do plan on having a TV in that room, your best bet would be to put it on the southern wall, and get good shades.

Our great room has windows on two walls and is south and south east facing, based on window locations. It’s a ton of light and we love it.

We have sun filtering shades. They block the glare but let in the light and it still feels bright but we can see tv.

Lots of light was really important to us too.

thanks guys, these are the type of experiences I was hoping to find. keep em coming!
our fireplace will be on the south wall(18') with windows on both sides.
we're thinking of doing angled transomes above those to match the ceiling but may rethink that because of glare.

we'll either have 3 3' wide windows on the east and west sides or 2 doubles(6' wide)

I'll have to talk to the builder and architect about longer overhangs on the south maybe and definitely need to plan on light filtering shades.

I would definitely overhang the south windows.

Glare can be an issue with one wall having windows. With appropriate southern overhang, I don't see it being a bigger problem than average just more persistent - like early and late instead of just early or just late.

Overheating will be a problem despite insulation. Insulation in the walls doesn't help the heat loss in the windows which will still be significant. Drapes/curtains/blinds help with heat loss if you close them.

Using a gas furnace is cheap of course but limits your options for room temperature control significantly. Radiant works, minisplits work. FIreplace works too of course. But only the mini will address the overheating issue. NG has to become more expensive for us to reach climate goals - and this should happen over the next decade (not reaching goals of course - but raising prices).

My parents (and for awhile myself) lived in a home with the living room having 3 exterior walls. It worked out well, just be prepared to draw the curtains in winter on whatever side the sun is on. (They overlooked a lake, and having the living room with large windows was a selling point for them.) They faced northwest, not south. I think the house could have been better insulated for winter (Connecticut, similar to your climate), but that's something to be designed into your home with the proper experts. Their house was built when heating oil was cheap.

We love ours! Lots of insulation and near perfect air sealing, great quality windows, and strategically planted deciduous vines and trees give us excellent control over temperature variation across the year with a ton of light and great views. HVAC demands are really minimal despite the amount of windows; no special design was required aside from the need to fight with the guys who kept wanting to install way more capacity than the design required.

unfortunately shade trees aren't much of an option. the land falls away towards the back.
the living room sits over the walkout and the land keeps falling away.

rwiegand does yours face to the south?
any overhangs?

yes, we are very excited about the options on this!

The main wall faces southeast no solid overhangs other than the ~2 ft eaves-- they don't shade the windows. We have 10 ft tall windows broken into several sections (the house is an interpretation of English Arts and Crafts), on the most prominent window we put a ~3 ft wide timber framed pergola on the outside with a wisteria vine so it's shaded in the summer but lets the sunlight in during the winter.

I would consider not doing windows on the western wall. There is no way to shade that late afternoon sun. Especially in summer when it will be hot.

My DH's office has windows on the south/east/west walls but he tends to like his rooms dark so keeps his blinds mostly closed. He also is always cold, so doesn't mind when the room heats up a bit more than the rest of the house in the late afternoon.

My studio has windows on the north/south/east walls and is absolutely ideal except for about 20 minutes in the morning. It's bright and sunny all day and because the main axis is north/south, there isn't the issue of excessive heat.

In our bedroom, our walls are south/east/west. In that case because we live in FL, we purposely chose not to put any windows on our west wall. It was a good decision.

On the back of our living room which faces south, we have a covered lanai that is about 9' deep. In summer the sun doesn't penetrate any part of the lanai or living room, yet the living room is still bright all day long. In winter, the sun streams into the living room too which is ideal for warming it on those cold, FL days. (Hey for us 68 is cold!)

Upstairs and around the rest of the house, our eaves are 32" deep which help shade the house all year round. We minimized windows on our west walls.

cpartist the west windows on our living room will be the only windows we have to the west since our attached garage will be on the west side of the house.

we are on a downhill slope from the west and have trees on the high side of our property. this fall our land was completely shaded by 6pm.
with that along with shades we'll make it work.

thanks for the comments guys. I love all the input

Live in western WI - southernish part of state. Our house is also one room wide - 20 x 32 and only 8' ceilings. We have windows on all four sides of the main floor. The front living space has a window seat on the east, front half of space; woodstove in south east corner, then wrapped windows along the south and around the front west corner.

We spent a lot if time on the site before building and realized there was a strong wind that comes down the valley and wanted to have it blow through and cool the house. We have been here 15 years and rarely turned on air conditioning because of the breeze. (Humidity, more than temps have changed that in recent summers, alas.) We have a screened porch directly below and I rarely bother to trek down there because of the porch atmosphere in the space.

In winter, I lower and raise a roman shade or two, following the sun direction, if I am reading on the south sofa. We definitely wanted the solar gain in the winter and used dark tile floors to capture. In a four season climate, we needed to think about climate priorities because what is good for winter can create difficulties in summer.