The quality of indoor environment in buildings is one of the key factors of user satisfaction, as it affects their health and well-being. The indoor environment comprises of several components; the chief among them being the thermal and humidity microclimate, lighting, acoustics and indoor air quality. These can also be summed up by the term building physics. The quality of the final indoor environment is largely decided in the initial phases of the building design. The spatial and material configuration of the house determines most of the daylight, acoustics and thermal qualities of the designed spaces. While, to some extent, it is possible to fix the indoor environment of a finished building by installing additional technologies, it is of course costly in terms of both money and energy efficiency. It is therefore a crucial skill for architects to be able to foresee the impact of their decisions in the early design stages on the indoor environmental quality in the finished building. Finding a compromise between the often contradictory demands on individual qualities (for example daylight versus heating) and optimizing the building design in a holistic manner is the other expertise necessary for ensuring a quality indoor environment. This article illustrates the architectural design process and its connection to the building physics on 3 examples/case studies of contemporary residential buildings. The individual factors (daylight, thermal qualities and acoustics) are analyzed mostly using software simulation methods. The factors and their significance for the building design are synthesized, taking into account also the legislative requirements for residential buildings. The article is a part of a larger research project which tries to answer the following set of questions: Which architectural features influence the individual factors of the indoor environment and how? and How do the individual factors of the indoor environment interact and influence each other?