Skylights and rooflights in Colyton

Colyton is a small town with a long memory. The parish church of St Andrew, with its octagonal lantern tower, anchors the centre, and the Market Place and the streets running off it hold the older houses: cob and stone cottages, rendered terraces, some thatch, and Georgian and Victorian fronts added to earlier buildings. Walls are thick and rarely plumb, and the rooms behind them are lower than in a modern house.

The old buildings stand close together, so a roof is often seen from a neighbour's garden or a lane even when it is hidden from the street. Behind the main streets are smaller yards, outbuildings and workshops turned into homes, and these are frequently the places where one new opening in the roof transforms a dark room.

The answer decides the product, the paperwork and how the ceiling is handled.

Colyton also has the tramway: the Seaton Tramway runs up the valley to a station at the edge of the town, and the little lanes around it mix cottages, converted buildings and gardens running down towards the river. Many homes there have extended at the back over the years, which means a single house can carry three or four different roof ages and coverings in one footprint.

Away from the middle the town thins into later nineteenth century terraces, twentieth century bungalows and semis, and a few recent small developments on the edges. Those have brick or render walls, tile or slate roofs and plasterboard ceilings, and they are the simplest houses in town to fit with a roof window.

So our first question is whether you live in the old core or on its fringe. The answer decides the product, the paperwork and how the ceiling is handled.

An ordinary Colyton house usually needs no planning application for a rooflight, since national permitted development reaches that far. Those limits, and how they apply to a side-facing pane, are laid out in our planning and Building Regulations guide. Where your case falls outside them, East Devon is the authority to ask.

Colyton's old core falls within a conservation area. Permitted development normally continues to apply within one, but a council can remove it by Article 4 direction, so find out from East Devon whether your own street is caught before you fix a design.

Listed buildings follow separate rules. A listed house needs consent for any change to its outside, a rooflight included, and for cutting into old fabric within. A flat or maisonette has no householder rights, so a rooflight there means a full planning application.

On a prominent slate slope, officers tend to favour a low-profile conservation rooflight with slim frames over a standard roof window.

The product follows the house, and for Colyton the choices run like this:

• Old cob and stone: conservation glazing in a rear slope, kept small and set low among the slates.
• Terraced loft rooms: a roof window that is top-hung or centre-pivot, fitted to the back slope.
• Kitchen and garden extensions: a roof lantern, or a low pane on an upstand.
• Bungalows and newer semis: a plain roof window above a loft bedroom, or a sun tunnel lighting a hall or bathroom.
• Worn or misted units: a new unit dropped into the existing opening, so the ceiling is barely disturbed.

Laminated glass inside is good practice wherever a rooflight sits above people.

Glass is picked for the room it serves. A north-facing landing takes clear, high-performance double glazing to pass on all the daylight the frame allows, while a bedroom that gets afternoon sun may suit solar control glass. Laminated glass inside is good practice wherever a rooflight sits above people.

All work meets the Building Regulations in force, with the thermal limits included. A complete replacement of frame and glass counts as notifiable work too, and Building Control contact is something we take on ourselves.

A kitchen extension is a common reason to look at a lantern. The kerb is built to the roof pitch, the glass chosen for the orientation, and the kerb's inner face is plastered or boarded so the lantern looks part of the room rather than a box on top of it. Electric opening units are worth considering where the glass is out of reach.

The coast is a short drive south, and the housing there is related but not the same. Our pages on rooflight installation in Seaton and Beer deal with sea air, shingle and a different planning picture.

The specification does not carry from one to the other. A seafront roof takes salt and wind, a Colyton roof takes valley damp and river mist, and the flashing, fixings and lining are chosen to suit the difference.

Colyford and the lanes between the two towns sit between those extremes, so we look at each roof on its own terms: the height above the river, the direction it faces, what has been built against it, and how much cover the neighbouring hill gives. A survey settles those points quickly, and they go into the written specification so that nothing is left to be guessed on the day.