Patterns of Light
There is a book called “A Pattern Language” that I used to develop the blueprint of our home with Matt. It contains universal patterns that can be adapted individually to make the spaces we use everyday come alive. I certainly did not follow all the patterns in this book. Some didn’t ring true for me and others I found too expensive or impractical. But most of the ones dealing with light did.
Light is the single most important element of home design for me. I knew that if we did not build in extended views of the outdoors and light, it didn’t matter what we did; these rooms would never become beautiful living spaces for us. And conversely, not matter how humble or simple our furnishings and the interior of our home, the light would beautify and entice us to want to dwell there.
Building a home requires a lot of thoughtful consideration to make it just right for the way we live. The spiritual creation of our home took a year and a half of planning and has continued to be adjusted over the last fifteen months of creating home physically. I have a feeling we will be building and refining our home and property our entire lives but as the Chinese proverb goes: “Man who finish house, die.”
This book captured my imagination because it put into writing, at a conscious level what I am drawn to in the places where we live. For instance, the authors of the book noticed every time they were sitting a room where they wanted to stay, it had natural light on two sides. This led to the observation that light which comes from only one side creates a glare around objects and people, making it more difficult to read the environment or a companion’s expression clearly.
This pattern held true when I cast my mind over the rooms I’ve liked best. It is quite rare to find a home with windows on two sides of it that isn’t so deep the light can penetrate to the middle of the room from both sides, but in one home we owned there was a L shaped window bench that had a window on each corresponding wall with the perfect stretch of drywall for a person to sit between them. Not only did this nook have the even lighting of two windows, but it had also south light (the warmest and best quality of light in my opinion) and a view of trees in the yard. If my time spent in each room of the house had been tracked, it would have been heavily concentrated here. It was where I ate, napped, read, played with the boys, invited friends to chat, and dreamed as I stared at the sky or the trees.
When I read that pattern, I recognized that I’d experienced and responded to it instinctively, and it was true. It became one of the guiding philosophies for the design of our home.
The den and “farmhouse kitchen” (another favorite pattern) have light on three sides including south light. The bedrooms have light from the east and the south (east light in a bedroom is another pattern because the sunrise provides the ideal light for waking up naturally). The bathrooms and stairwell have light on one side because they meet the exceptions to this pattern: they are eight feet deep from the windows, will be painted white, and the master and stairwell have multiple windows. Another way around this pattern that we didn’t use is to put in clerestory windows. We also placed windows at the end of rooms and corridors to subconsciously invite us to travel along the house.
The patterns for light even determined the shape of our house. A long stretched out home with wings is good for getting light from more than side, as opposed to the boxy homes builders usually build for cost and convenience (it is also a critical shape for providing people with privacy when they want to be alone). It’s shallow depth also allows the light to penetrate most of the room. One of the reasons we kept our house only 16 feet wide was so the light could flood it.
Light was also the reason I ultimately couldn’t go through with the custom home we had planned to build in a residential neighborhood. Even though we had made jogs in the house, instead of a simple rectangular shape (which made the roof plans complicated), so that most room could have windows are least at two outer corners we realized our efforts were in vain. The neighboring houses would block most of our light and our view of the sunrises and sunsets. It was stifling to think about living in the shadows of other structures. You would think that living in a trailer under 300 square feet as a family would feel small, and it did but not nearly as small as it sounds. Lots of windows and uninterrupted views across fields, hills, and sky as far as the eye could see did wonders for making our temporary home feel more expansive than it was.
Light is the magic ingredient. Anywhere there is a pool of light on the floor, a counter, a bench- I’m there soaking in it. So let there be light!
