Holloway & Holloway Architects Home Office - Unlimited Rooflight

Vicky and Nick, the owners of Holloway and Holloway, a London based architecture studio, share their story on living and working under the same roof, in a stunning recently extended house where they added an Unlimited Rooflight.

Questions to Vicky and Nick:

What was the decision-making trigger in choosing daylight from above?

To be honest there was no choice here. In a London mid-terraced property, even a semi-detached one, when you do a side infill to increase the rear of the property by filling in the gap between the properties, it creates a dark space in the centre of the property where there is no natural light.

So, you generally counter this by adding roof lights in the ceiling over the new extension, and make sure that they are placed fairly close to the back of the room so that you can flood that space with natural light.

Vertical windows tend to allow a good level of natural light to penetrate around 6 meters into a building. Not only do roof lights allow a lot more light in a space than a vertical window, but as you can place these in more central areas in the room, they are nearly the only way to get daylight into the centre of your house.

We have our office in the central room of the property, so for us, we had to have good natural light levels in this area as we spend the most amount of time here in the whole house.

You added a rather large rooflight to your extension - The Unlimited Rooflight. What impact does it have on the space?

It is amazing how bright the space is. We get so much light from above that the space always has a wonderful vibrance to it during the daytime.

But I think that possibly what’s even more striking than the amount of light itself is the size of the glass, its 5m² total, split into 2 pieces. It makes it feel as though there is more glass than there is solid roof up there, it really is the wow feature of the whole space.

Whilst we had expected that when we designed it as it was always meant to be the feature in the room, what we hadn’t realized was how much it would make the space feel bigger. With extensions on a mid-terrace property, you are often limited as to how high you can build so your ceiling height can be capped at a certain level, but having this huge opening in the middle of the room makes the whole space feel like you’ve got this really grand ceiling height, it has such an effect on how the space feels. 

Tell us what was the timeline from inspiration to finished interiors? I'm sure it's a question you get very often.

Indeed. Well we actually only found out about Vario by VELUX as we were on site, they were just about to start the roof construction as we found out about them, so we didn’t have a huge amount of time and had to get things organized very quickly! 

From finding the products to getting them on site it was only a matter of weeks, once we had chosen a size for the roof lights all we had to do was confirm the opening dimensions to our contractors, and double check with the structural engineer that the roof structure was ok to support the new roof light. Once that was all sorted all we had to do was wait, it was a very easy process. 

The project took around 4 months on site in total, but the roof lights go in fairly near the end of the project, so once they’re in it’s all very exciting, as you are close to completion.