Skylights & rooflights in Sutton Coldfield

A lantern gives an extension height and a bright centre. A flat rooflight sits low and lets in even light. A roof window brings daylight into a pitched roof.

Your quote sets the suitable ones side by side, so you can choose the trade-off yourself.

Roof windows in older roofs

Older houses in Four Oaks, Mere Green and Boldmere are roofed in clay tile or slate. Either covering calls for its own flashing kit around a roof window, and the size has to suit the gap between the rafters unless some timber is to be trimmed, which the quote then shows.

We check the rafter spacing and the tile or slate before we suggest a size, so the quote compares windows that will actually fit without surprises once the tiles are off.

Hipped roofs are common on the interwar semis, and a hip-to-gable loft conversion changes the slope you have to work with. If a conversion is planned, we look at the drawings first so the roof windows sit where the rooms will need them, and we can agree the order of work with your builder.

Under the trees

Roads around Four Oaks and the edges of Sutton Park are lined with mature trees, and many back gardens elsewhere in the town have trees close by. Trees change both the upkeep of a rooflight and the glass that suits it.

First, leaves and needles settle on flat glass. A flat rooflight with a slight fall, or a lantern with its steep sides, sheds them more easily than a unit laid nearly level, and a self-cleaning coating helps rain carry the dust away. Second, shade changes the glass choice. A rooflight beneath trees gets less summer sun, which can make a solar control coating matter less than a good winter figure. At the survey we note what hangs over the roof, and the glass is quoted to suit.

Where a tree is protected by a tree preservation order or sits in a conservation area, any work to it needs the council's consent. We place the rooflight and choose the glass around the tree, rather than the other way round.

Sutton Coldfield has its own town council, Royal Sutton Coldfield Town Council, set up in 2016. Planning decisions are still made by Birmingham City Council, so any application, and any question about whether permitted development applies to your house, goes to the city council.

Permitted development lets many a rooflight or roof window in a Sutton Coldfield house be fitted with no application having to be made. The conditions are set out in our rooflight planning guide. Where the house is listed, listed building consent is the route for a rooflight however far those rights stretch, while a condition attached to an ordinary house's permission, or an Article 4 direction, takes them away altogether.

Parts of Sutton Coldfield sit inside conservation areas. The city council publishes a map of them, and we check your address against it before we suggest a unit. Where a conservation area or a condition affects the front or side of the roof, a slim conservation rooflight that sits low in the slope is often the unit to compare.

Conservation rooflights for older roofs

A conservation rooflight is a roof window made to look like the cast iron rooflights of the past: a slim dark frame, often a single vertical glazing bar, and a low profile that lies near the plane of the tiles or slates. It still has modern sealed glazing, and like any unit it is held to the thermal limit for its type, which the maker's data states.

On a villa roof in Four Oaks, or a period house near the old town centre, it can be the unit that keeps the roof looking right from the street. Compared with an ordinary roof window of the same size it usually costs more and takes longer to arrive, which is why both go on the quote for you to weigh. Our page on conservation rooflight installation compares the makes and finishes.