skylights & rooflights in lyndhurst

Two things people assume about the National Park

Planning for Lyndhurst, Emery Down and Minstead sits with the park's own authority.

Planning for homes here sits with the park's own authority, and the park status leads to two beliefs we hear at the start of a job. One is that no new window may go in a roof. The other is that a house well away from the Forest edge escapes every rule. Both are wrong, and both can cost a homeowner weeks.

Lyndhurst's conservation area, first designated in 1977, takes in the High Street and the historic core, Goose Green and Shrubbs Hill, Bolton's Bench with the cemetery, and planned Victorian and Edwardian roads such as Queen's Road, and the Authority's appraisal splits it into 12 character areas. At Emery Down the almshouses known as the Boultbee Cottages are listed Grade II and stand within the Forest Central (South) conservation area. A conservation area or a National Park does not remove the rooflight right on its own. The right goes only where the authority has made an Article 4 direction for the area, or where the original permission for the house carried a condition. Our planning guide explains the mechanism, so it is not repeated here.

A listed building follows a separate route. Listed building consent is the question for a new roof opening on one, and works carried out without it are an offence. Historic England's list shows whether an address is listed, and the Park Authority's planning records show its history. We read both at the survey, and you can read them before we call.

The Park Authority also publishes design guidance for the area. Reading that guidance before choosing a product tells you how the authority regards roof alterations on a front slope, and it helps when you are weighing a flush conservation-style unit against a standard roof window.

Minstead and Emery Down fold into the same checks as Lyndhurst because they fall under the same authority. A cottage at Emery Down may sit within a different conservation area from a villa in the village, so the boundary is looked up by the full address.

Brick shops on the High Street, low eaves out at Emery Down

The village centre and its outer hamlets want different kinds of rooflight.

The High Street is where the Victorian rebuilding is easiest to read. Shops of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mainly three storeys of brick under tile or slate and several in a mock Tudor style with jettied upper floors, stand beside the older two-storey brick houses of the historic core. Above the shops there are often rooms in the roof that have only small windows at the gable, and these are the rooms a roof window changes most.

A word on materials. Old slate can be brittle after a century or more, and tiles on the older cottages are often handmade and uneven. The fitter has to lift and relay them around a new opening, and the survey allows for a stock of matching pieces. A new frame in an old covering needs the surrounding slates sound enough to be re-fixed.

Queen's Road and Princes Crescent hold detached and semi-detached villas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century behind hedges and picket fences, and Shrubbs Hill Road has larger detached houses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries set in big gardens. These are big roofs with long slopes and deep valleys. The rooms below them are tall, so a roof window gives light from a much greater height than it does in a bungalow, and the choice of size matters.

Out towards Emery Down and Minstead the roofs are smaller. Forest cottages sit low, eaves drop close to the ground, and the rooms under the slope are narrow. On the conservation-area roofs, a conservation rooflight with slim framing sits flush with the covering, and can be easier to justify to the authority on a front slope. A roof window suits the plainer tiled house.

The twentieth-century homes on the village edges have plain tiled roofs, and they are the simplest to survey. The rafters are regular, the covering is common, and there is usually a clear loft. Light is the usual request, in a landing, a bathroom or a back bedroom that faces a neighbour's wall.

Wherever the house stands, the order of work is the same. We measure first, we check the records, and only then do we name a product. A product chosen before the survey is a guess about the slope, and the slope is where fitting problems start.

Interiors matter here as much as the roof. A shaft or reveal in a high Victorian room is lined and painted to match, and a deep splay at the opening spreads light wider than a square cut. We discuss the lining at the survey, so the finish is chosen with the window.

Pairs of roof windows are common in the larger rooms. Two narrow units side by side, each between its own pair of rafters, can light a long room more evenly than a single wide window, and they avoid cutting more timber than necessary. The survey sheet records the centres so that the pairing is drawn before any size code is picked.