Skylights and rooflights for Bristol homes

Sunrise in midsummer arrives well before most alarms, and a roof window looks straight at the sky. In a loft bedroom that means daylight across the pillow hours before anyone wants it, unless the window was chosen with a blind that shuts it out.

Blackout comes first for any sleeping room under the roof. Summer mornings get light very early, so the room needs a blind chosen for that job, with electric or solar operation where the window is too high or too far over the bed to reach. We tell you which blinds the maker offers for the window we suggest, so the blind is settled at the same time as the glass.

Bristol's hills bring a second question, which is who can see in. On a sloping street, a loft window on one terrace can face the back bedrooms of the next terrace up. By day the glass is hard to see through from outside. After dark it works the other way: with a bedside lamp on, the room is lit and the sky beyond the glass is not, so anyone above can see straight in, while from the bed the pane simply shows the lamp back. The same blackout blind that keeps the June morning out keeps the room private in the evening.

How the window opens decides where furniture can go. A centre-pivot window turns on a pivot partway down the sash, so part of it swings into the room. A top-hung window opens outward from the top edge, which leaves the room side clear. Our comparison of the two covers how each suits a bed, a desk or a dressing table under the slope.

Overnight, a sleeping room gathers moisture from the people breathing in it, and the glass is often the coldest surface, so a cold night can leave droplets on the inner pane by morning. Airing the room gives that moisture somewhere to go, and some roof windows have a vent that can stay open while the sash is shut.

In an older house with a slate roof, the roof window may also need to suit the look of the street, particularly where the house is listed. A conservation rooflight is made with that in mind.

Bristol has two principal railway stations. Bristol Temple Meads, near the city centre, has trains to London Paddington as well as local, regional and CrossCountry services, and the Severn Beach Line runs out to Avonmouth and Severn Beach. For anyone who travels to work, a winter weekday can begin and end in the dark, so a kitchen extension is often used most in the hours when a roof lantern is not letting any daylight in at all. That is worth knowing before choosing the glass.

A roof lantern sits on an upstand, a raised kerb built up from the flat roof, and the roof covering is dressed up its sides. Its size is set by the room, by the joists that carry the roof and by how much of the ceiling should open up. A lantern too large for the room can feel like a conservatory roof on a kitchen. One too small can look lost. We measure the room as well as the roof, and look at where the table, the island and the worktops sit, because the best place for the glass is usually over the part of the room used most.

The structure under the lantern decides a good deal. Cutting an opening in a flat roof means trimming joists and carrying their load to either side, and on an older extension the timbers and the deck have to be checked before anything is ordered. If the extension is still being built, the opening can be framed in from the start, which is simpler.

Access is the practical part in a terraced street. Where the only way to the back is through the house, the lantern frame and glass have to come through the hall and kitchen, or be lifted over the roof. We look at that on the survey, because it can change what kind of lantern is sensible to fit.

On a new extension, the lantern is assessed with the extension, and we confirm the position with Bristol City Council before work starts. On an existing roof, a lantern usually stands well proud of the surface, so the planning guide is the place to check the rules, and we check them for your house.

Finished well, the lantern's inner frame and the plaster around it line up square with the room. That finish is what you look at every evening, long after the daylight has gone. Our roof lantern page goes through the options.