EYE ON DESIGN
By Patricia Dane Rogers
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2000; Page H05
An old-fashioned front porch may be the best place ever invented for chilling out on a sultry summer day. But the very shade that a porch is added to provide can have a downside: darkened rooms inside the house. "If you want a porch, you need to figure out how to preserve what light you have or how to get the sun into the rooms behind it," says Phillip R. Eagleburger of Treacy & Eagleburger Architects in the District.
Skylights in the porch roof, he says, are one way to go.
Eagleburger and his partner, Jane Treacy, used skylights to make sure that clients who wanted to expand a north-facing front porch in Chevy Chase would not end up with a gloomy living room or dining room.
"The north side of the house gets the least amount of sun to begin with," says Treacy. "The concern was that extending a porch across the full width of the house would mean keeping even more sunlight out of the rooms."
The trick, says Eagleburger, is to align the skylights with the windows below. In this design, two narrow skylights are positioned above each of the four front windows of the traditional Colonial Revival house.
Stephen Muse of the Washington firm Muse Architects took the skylight idea one step further. To bring sunlight into a family room addition in McLean, he designed wide skylights so the sun would pour down through the two pairs of French doors below. He also added a dormer above the porch to double the light flooding the family room.
Clients get the best of all possible worlds, says Muse: a shady porch and a sunny room.
Have a decorating or design problem or solution? Share it with us. Write to Eye on Design, Home Section, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071; or e-mail Patricia Dane Rogers at rogersp@washpost.com. We regret that we cannot answer each message because of the volume of responses.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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