Going up for light - light monitor

Sunset, June, 1994 by Peter O. Whiteley

Adding a monitor brightened this little Los Angeles house and made it seem bigger

LIVING AT THE bottom of a tree-shrouded canyon sounds romantic--until you realize how little sunlight manages to percolate down through the mantle of leaves to the windows. One remedy is to reach up for the light with a broad shaft that punches through ceilings and the roof.

That's the solution that Mahtash K. Rahbar and Scott Strumwasser of Enclosures Architects came up with for Sally and Frank Krasne's Los Angeles house. A 13-foot-square light shaft, or monitor, rises 6 feet above the old roof like an oversize periscope. But instead of one viewing port, it has four slender windows, each running the full width of a side. A new peaked roof atop the windows protects the dining room below from direct sunlight.

The 17-foot-tall monitor replaces the dining room's old low-pitched ceiling, giving the house a core of diffused daylight as well as a dramatic new volume without adding any floor space. Opening up walls between the dining room and the kitchen on one side and the master bedroom on another also made the small house feel larger.