A rooflight with a difference
Mark Brinkley’s kitchen has a huge retractable rooflight that transforms the space at the touch of a button. But was it really worth the cost?
One of the defining trends of recent years has been the overhead rooflight.this has been partly driven by our desire for natural light, which rooflights deliver more of than vertical windows (three times as much according to some suppliers), and partly by technological innovations that have made it feasible to place large sheets of glass in demanding locations. Structural glass, they call it.you can make walls, ceilings and even floors out of it, and you can join it together without any supporting frame. It looks miraculous, but of course it comes with a serious price tag attached.
We took the plunge on our self-build, placing a 4.2m x 1.2m opening rooflight over our flatroofed kitchen.the rooflight, half of which slides open, cost £27,000 — more than all our more conventional windows combined, and about the same as the kitchen underneath.that’s an awful lot of holidays, or quite a fancy new car. Was it worth it?
It certainly wasn’t mere frippery. We were building on a narrow site where conventional windows weren’t permitted, so we had little choice but to light our kitchen from above. A rooflight was really the only way to go.
The cheapest solution would have been an off-the-peg skylight, which can be purchased and fitted for a few thousand. But we wanted something a little more sophisticated: a rooflight connected with a high level window. We also wanted it to be triple glazed, because all our other joinery was, and we wanted some sun protection to counteract our fears of overheating, which meant low-g factor glass. Each of these requirements added thousands to the price, but it was our decision to make the rooflight retractable that was by far the biggest outlay. This added half as much again to the cost, but it creates an extraordinary wow factor. In the summer months, we can eat al fresco at our kitchen table at the press of a switch.
The triple glazing means that there is precious little heat loss during the long winter nights. It’s actually more challenging in summer when the sun beats down directly overhead for around three hours in the middle of the day. You would think that this would be the moment to open the rooflight, but if there is no wind, it stays cooler with it closed, because the low-g factor glass is pretty effective at reflecting the sun’s rays.
At the height of last year’s heatwave, we found ourselves keeping the rooflight closed until around 4pm, only opening it in the evening to encourage a cooling breeze in. These days, we often don’t open it at all. In truth, as the novelty wears off, we are getting less and less use from it.
While our opening rooflight, has been a marvellous feature to have, in retrospect we could probably have specified a fixed rooflight, saved ourselves £10k, and been just as happy.