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Light is a really important design element.
And in homes, it's really important to have natural light and be able to give real life to space.
We moved into this house about 11 years ago, and we immediately fell in love with the energy of the house.
It was built in 1937, and it had beautiful bones, but it was smaller than what we needed. Wasn't enough light, there wasn't enough space.
We went to a home renovation tour, and we met Dawn Zuber.
We liked her design sensibilities and we liked her personality, so we thought, "Well, let's see what she can come up with."
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The most important thing for them was to have a kitchen that functioned and that was full of light.
Jessica's job requires that she prepares food and photographs it for publication, so she needed a space where she was able to do that and have plenty of light.
In the old kitchen, there was one time of day when I had the right light, and one space in the kitchen where I could take the photo.
Now I have a whole kitchen available to me.
As long as there's any daylight, I have an easy way of lighting the photography pretty well.
The quality of light from above tends to be a little bit more diffuse and reflect off the ceiling a little more, where window light can be very directional depending on where the sun is at the time.
I was absolutely, steadfastly against skylights because of an experience that I had where we had skylights in the bedrooms, and you had to tape them off because skylights at that time were prone to leaks.
Obviously, we've come a long way, and when Dawn really pushed that we would really like to have skylights because light was so important to me, I finally gave in, and we are thrilled with the amount of light that we deal with every day.
I think that being able to see the sky through skylights really gives you a nice connection with the outdoors.
I can't remember ever specifying anything besides a VELUX skylight.
They've just been part of my design toolbox for forever, and I love using them.