Let the Sun Shine In: Products To Bring Light into the Home

For the homeowner who has everything - except enough sunshine - a growing industry of boutique firms and architects is collecting, hoarding and taming the daylight that streams into your house.
By: Christina S.N. Lewis: The Wall Street Journal Online
Gary Lauder's spread in Aspen, Colo., has all the fancy trappings you'd expect to find in a venture capitalist's second home. It's full of folk art and antiques, and sports a gym, guest rooms, a media room and a mud room. But to take it all in, you might need to get out your Ray-Bans.

Once the sun comes up, light doesn't simply stream in through the windows, it invades from every angle. Sunlight bounces up into the kitchen, reflected by skylight shafts and mirrored cabinet tops. A set of automated windows and shades open the moment the outside temperature hits 74 degrees. Once installed, four platter-sized reflectors will funnel sunshine down a stairway and into the basement. "It will look like the sun is directly overhead for eight hours a day," says Mr. Lauder.

Here's an illuminating development. For the homeowner who has everything - except enough sunshine - a growing industry of boutique firms and architects is collecting, hoarding and taming the daylight that shines into your home. Called "daylighting," the practice involves gizmos from melon-shaped "skylights" that capture and funnel sun through roofs to software programs that command shades to retract depending on the time of year.

In January, Velux America, a skylight company in Greenwood, S.C., introduced technology that electrifies glass panels, clouding them up to block the sun. Each 2-foot by 4-foot panel costs $2,000. In the past two years, business has been so strong at one Seattle lighting lab that the backers launched three satellite offices in the region. MechoShade in New York has a new $25,000 software program for the home that adjusts lighting and shades depending on each room's location and exposures. The tagline: "Integrate the sun."

Dogged by a flood of cheap imported shades and curtains from China, the U.S. lighting and window-coverings industries are looking for some bright ideas to boost business. Not only have window-coverings sales been flat -- they rose 1.8% last year -- residential-lighting sales rose 1.3% annually between 1998 and 2003, according to Business Trend Analysts, a market-research firm in Commack, N.Y. But the growth in daylighting services and products also reflects a broader societal trend toward products that are perceived to be energy-friendly or environmentally conscientious. Companies like Lutron Electronics in Coopersburg, Pa., are promoting their systems as a way to cut down on energy use.

Lights Off at Night

But environmentalists say the pitch is slightly misleading. Lighting makes up just a small percentage of energy consumption in a home - about 5%, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. - and the high-tech daylighting systems don't significantly reduce energy costs. Furthermore, homeowners mainly use their lights at night when there's no sun anyway, says Jay Hall, a manager with the Building Council. The energy savings of something like an automated shading system rarely cover the initial cost of the system. "I don't think that there's a huge opportunity for lighting energy savings," says Mr. Hall.

Some architects are also critics, saying that a mechanized approach to daylight is unnecessarily complicated. A cheaper, more efficient way to get more sun in the house would be to orient rooms around the compass, placing morning areas like bedrooms and kitchens in the east, and living and dining rooms in the south or west. "They'd do much better to just design the building properly in the first place," says Lisa Heschong, a commercial architect who has written about the effect of lighting on students and workers. She calls the high-tech solutions "Band-Aids and repair jobs to bad design."

John Heily simply knew he wanted more sun in his Seattle home than its floor-to-ceiling windows could capture. The food-company chief executive discussed the issue with his architect, who had a solution: installing high windows, hidden by reflective white shelves, to boost the reflection factor. Now, Mr. Heily has a domed living-room ceiling that cost $60,000 -- twice the price of a normal ceiling, according to the architect -- with the soft, infinite look of the sky. The only drawback is that the hard-to-reach windows need to be cleaned twice a year. (He hires a window-washer with a really tall ladder.) "Dust collects up there," he says.

Technology to help manage daylight originated about 30 years ago as a way to reduce energy costs for office buildings. The practice has gained traction in recent years as studies showed that exposure to natural light brings benefits that range from lower job stress to faster healing times for hospital patients. Now, new software programs are allowing architects and lighting experts to manage light better, and are helping popularize the concept with residential projects.

At Washington's Seattle Daylighting Lab, the past three decades' transition is like night and day. Started in 1975 at the University of Washington, the nonprofit lab was created to help commercial buildings save energy and is now funded by regional utilities. Today, its technicians often offer their services to residential architects hired by private clients. (The lab charges architects about $5,000 a project to develop high-end residences.) Since 2004, the utilities that sponsor the lab have opened sites in Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; and Bozeman, Mont.

The lab's big draw is an 8-by-8-foot mirrored box, lit by rows of fluorescent bulbs that simulate the sky. To start a job, the architect clamps a microwave-oven-sized model of the home to a table inside the box. The home is tilted according to the site's latitude, then rotated while Joel Loveland, the lab's director, films the interior. A colored spotlight shines overhead, standing in for the sun. Since the fake sun isn't as strong as the real sun, sometimes Mr. Loveland's team takes the table out to the parking lot for a dose of real rays.

For one recent job, Mr. Loveland teamed up with architect Jim Olson on behalf of an art-collecting homeowner. The challenge was to build an 11,000-square-foot home with plentiful light -- but not so much it would damage paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. The duo installed postage-stamp-sized duplicates of the art inside a 1/24th-scale cardboard model of the home, glued photo sensors to the walls, and then tweaked the model for several months until they were sure that direct sunlight would never hit the artworks. It's a typical job, says Mr. Loveland. "The art wants to be living in a black box and the client wants to live with it."

More Light, Less Stress

In the most experimental cases, light-harvesting techniques are moving outdoors. In Austria, lighting-design company Bartenbach LichtLabor plans to mount large mirrors on nearby hillsides to beam sunlight into the 1,000-year-old town of Rattenberg, population 500, which is shaded by one large hill in the winter. The reflected beams will light up the town's main drag, Sudtiroler Strasse, and create the impression of a sunny city, says Helmar Zangerl, president of Bartenbach. The hope is that the project will lighten the local mood and help retain citizens.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. Pat Trowbridge recently paid $450 for a tubular skylight that bounces sun into his San Diego kitchen. But the 8-foot-long pipe floods in so much light, the retiree says he has to look away. "I feel like I could get a suntan," says Mr. Trowbridge. His solution: Maybe buying a shade to cover the skylight.