Headcorn skylights and rooflights

Listed, old, or both

A listed house keeps its Class C permitted development rights, but a new or altered roof window on it will almost always need listed building consent, and the council that receives that application is Maidstone Borough Council. The officer will look at the slope, the size of the unit, the frame and how it sits in the roof covering. A house that is old without being listed is treated differently, with the roof structure and the original covering the main concerns. We ask which of those applies before we talk about glass, and our skylight planning guide sets out how the rules sort the two apart.

The conservation area

Headcorn also has a conservation area of its own. Living inside one does not by itself remove Class C; only an Article 4 direction does that, and the conservation area rooflight guide explains how the pieces fit. We look up your address with the council before anything is priced.

Church Walk and Station Road

Houses on roads like these that have been added to over generations tend to share a few habits: a front room with a good window, a middle room reached through it, and a back addition that was built later and lit from one side. When the back addition gets a deeper extension, the room in front of it loses the little light it had.

What goes in depends on whether the roof over that room is pitched, flat or somewhere between.

A box room under the slope

Box rooms often sit under a sloping ceiling on one side. The existing window may look out over a garden, but it sits low, and light from it falls on the floor near the glass and dwindles over the rest of the room. A roof window in the slope sits higher on the wall and lets daylight reach the far corner and the ceiling. Its size is set by the gap between the rafters and by the room, and we measure both at the survey. The roof window page covers the product itself.

The landing outside that box room is often the darker space of the two. Glazing set in the slope over the stairwell lights it. Where the loft is too cramped for a window, a sun tunnel will do the same job, and either can go into the rear slope, so the front elevation stays as it is. Which slope we use matters more on a listed or older house, and it is one of the first things we mark up in the loft.

The garden room

A garden room has glass on the side facing the lawn and walls on the other three. The back of the room, the part furthest from the doors, gets whatever light travels across the floor, and on a grey afternoon that is little. A flat rooflight over the back third, or a lantern if the roof has the depth and the structure for one, puts daylight where the doors cannot reach. On a flat roof a lantern normally rises higher than 150 mm, which usually takes it outside Class C, so the first call is to the planning department, with the lantern's height and position to hand. The rules for a raised lantern are laid out in a separate lantern planning page, which is worth reading before you ring anyone. Where a garden room stands apart from the house it is a separate building, and whether the permitted development rules for the house reach it is a question we put to Maidstone Borough Council with the plans in front of us.

Flat roofs differ in their covering, falls and the direction their joists run. We check those at the survey, then choose between a flat roof rooflight and a raised lantern, and settle the upstand or kerb that carries it. A garden room built a few years ago may be a lightweight structure, and the frame has to take the glass and its own weight, so we look at what is under the covering before the product is chosen.

The bathroom with no outside wall

Extended houses sometimes end up with an upstairs bathroom at the heart of the plan, lit by a bulb and ventilated by a fan. Daylight from above makes a room like that feel bigger and shows when the grout wants attention. Steam is the reason to be careful. The glazing has to cope with condensation, the unit has to sit where the ventilation can work with it, and the finish inside the reveal needs to shed moisture. We specify those when we price the job.

With a pitched roof, a roof window above the bath or the basin does the work. A sun tunnel suits a loft that leaves no room for a window: daylight comes in through a dome on the slope and travels down a short shaft to a diffuser in the ceiling. The cut in the roof is small, so very little of the structure around it is disturbed.

Any new opening in a roof is building work, and we handle the Building Control notification where it is notifiable. A roof window that replaces an old one has to meet an energy limit of its own, and the skylight Building Regulations guide gives the figure for each type of unit. That includes a swap of an old unit in a roof that already has one.

Tiles, timbers and the opening

Where the roof is covered in clay tiles, the flashing has to tuck under the courses above the opening and lap over the courses below it. On an older roof the battens and the tile sizes may not match modern stock, so we look at the underside from the loft before choosing the flashing set.

In a timber-framed house the roof timbers may show or may sit behind later plaster. A roof window needs rafters to frame against, so we trace where the original timbers run and where later ones were added before an opening is marked. Old timbers are cut only to a plan made beforehand, so the position is worked out around the framing we can see.

The same checks apply when the room under the slope is a bedroom. The lining of the opening is plastered or boarded to match the ceiling, and its depth follows the thickness of the roof structure between the slope and the room, so the edge of the glass sits in a clean reveal.

The flat-roofed garden room from above

A flat roof is usually built up in layers: boarding, insulation and a weatherproof skin. An opening cuts through all three, so the upstand has to stand high enough for the waterproofing to turn up its sides, and the insulation continues up inside it. The depth of each layer sets the height of the upstand, which is why we confirm the build-up on the roof.

Neighbouring villages we also cover include Staplehurst, Sutton Valence and Biddenden. Reach us on WhatsApp at 07880 284133, by email at info@orchardskylightsmaidstone.co.uk, or through the quote form further down. A photograph of the dark room and your postcode is enough to start, and the free survey comes before any figure is named.

A garden room or bathroom is quicker to plan if you can tell us what is above it: a flat roof, a pitched one, or a loft. Roof type is the first thing we ask, because it settles which of the products above can go in at all.