Skylights offer a unique and alluring design element to your home. They don’t only provide natural light and save on excess energy costs, but they enable delightful design alternatives to your spaces.
From complementing your roof trusses and window placements to aligning with your furniture and other components, skylights offer you a lot in terms of look and feel. Not to forget, these rooftop openings also have a vast array of functional value, too!
If you’re not sure how to place or install yours – and where to place them for that matter – then the ideas below are for you.
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Draws Focus to the Different Elements
In terms of placement, your skylights can be installed so they align with corresponding windows. Not only does this create symmetry between your windows and skylights, but it draws your attention to both components as well.
This strategy will also create a unified set of natural light sources in your room. This is not only appealing, but it also makes it useful in terms of furniture placement. For example, if you’re planning to implement this in your office space or library, then this placement of natural light can be used to illuminate your desk area. In a study you can light up the bookshelves. Likewise, this symmetry will also extend to your lounge where you need to prioritise the seating area and TV in the room.
Isolated Placements
Isolated and offset skylights are meant to perform a particular function in your room. They can be especially useful for your bathroom, where you’d place a skylight right above your shower or bath.
Bathrooms are generally small, so these installations would provide more light without robbing you of privacy, while making the room look bigger. In terms of function, they’ll offer more ventilation in a room where moisture can easily gather and damage your walls or ceiling.
Since steam and hot air rises, a skylight right above your bath or shower will let that vapour out immediately.
Additionally, isolated skylights can also brighten workspaces in other rooms, such as your sink and island counter in a kitchen or your office desk in the study.
Creating Symmetry with the Roof
Not all ceilings are flat and horisontal and some follow the same sort of trajectory with the angle of your roof trusses. In these cases you can install your skylights so that it creates symmetry in terms of the distance from the roof ridge, as well as the aligned wall components.
In that case, symmetrical skylights may be useful in being aligned with your window or sliding door, thus creating a fresh, satisfying look. Likewise, they can also be aligned with bookshelves that are hammered into each wall, and so on. With skylights Sydney homeowners have endless options!
Alternatively, if your roof beams are criss-crossing or forming another shape, you can place a skylight within those patterns to form symmetry and complement the room.
Scattered skylights between roof beams also create a sense of rhythm and consistency, since it unifies the ceiling components. Not only does this have a balanced appeal, but it disperses light evenly throughout your room.
Vertical Skylights
If you’re dealing with a narrow room or space like a passage or hallway, then a must have is to install vertical skylights. Since space is limited, use this unique installation. Vertical skylights essentially create the idea of more space from above simply by moving the windowpanes higher.
This also draws your eyes upward and takes your focus off the small space in the room, thus giving an illusion that your area of use is bigger.
Creating Focal Points
Skylights can be installed in such a way that the entering light changes as the sun crosses the sky. This ‘moving light’ then creates different areas of focus in your room. It can be delightful to implement this in your bedroom, above your bed, where your sleeping patterns may be determined by the time of day.
Similarly, skylights can be installed to mirror other components, like a glass door or windows, as well as furniture items such as paintings on the wall or even a carpet below. These strategies draw attention to a particular design element that brings the whole room together.
Can you see that skylights have both decorative and functional value?
[Conclusion]
Ultimately, skylights are not meant to overexpose your room or living spaces, but complement them in a balanced and pleasing way. Before considering installing skylights you need to also observe the size and shape of your room and how they’ll fit into the structure.
In design, almost everything is about focus, symmetry and communication. If all three components are tied together, you’re sure to have a very admirable living space. For many reasons, skylights can help you achieve this goal in a very unique way.