Skylights & Volumes: A Modern Power Couple

Open volumes add spaciousness to a home, and skylights bring in floods of natural light. Together these signature design elements create a bright and modern living environment.

Volumes

As described by our principal architect, Marc Whipple, the central volume of a home is the magic that allows, “A visual connection along different axes within the house, reminders of where you are going and where you have been..”. This creates a sense of “living small” within spacious, multi-story homes. 

We first applied this “‘living small” concept at our Summit house in Beverly Hills, designing the home in a way that would allow the family members to stay connected visually throughout the space.

Most recently the “living small” concept was employed at our Bundy Drive house in Brentwood, where view corridors and rooms throughout the open volume home look on the central living area, and out to the backyard.

The open volume areas in homes are often where central staircases are located, but the weightless feeling in these vast open plan spaces can be maintained with floating stair designs that let light pass through them. With its design centered around a three story open central volume and rising flight of stairs, the interior of our Walker Road house in Great Falls, Virginia remains bright and airy.

An open central volume housing a glass box floating stairway is also found at our Summit house in Beverly Hills.

Horizontal volume is found in the living room of our Trousdale house. The sliding glass walls open, allowing the room to expand outdoors, and while this space is not vertically tall, the horizontal volume ensures an expansive feeling.

Skylights

When topped with skylights, the central volumes of homes are transformed into atrium-like spaces that can bring natural light all the way down to lower levels. This eliminates the concept of a dark, windowless basement, and below grade rooms become bright and livable extensions of the rest of the home. At our Trousdale house in Beverly Hills the central skylight brings a shower of sunlight into the entire open volume house, reaching through the glass bridge walkway to lower rooms. 

With an additional skylight over the kitchen, and skylights on either side of the primary shower, this entire home is filled with natural light.

The custom skylight at our Georgina Avenue house in Santa Monica is made with 9 combined Velux units that offer an enormous window onto the sky, while lighting up the art filled interior. 

Playful light from a series of skylights in the double height roof dapple the foyer of our Benedict Canyon house in Beverly Hills.

And at Laurel Way, a glass floor walkway doubles as a skylight for the wine room below, bringing natural light in from the foyer’s glass walls.