A Light in the Attic
Forgive my borrowing of the Shel Silverstein book title, but it was so fitting (plus my wife suggested it).
Light. Perhaps the first consideration of space. Attics are often an underused space in older homes and offer unique access to natural light.
Mansions often used the third floor space for ballrooms or servant quarters. Before the advent of the automobile, and the ensuing garage, attics were the place of things past, things forgotten, histories in chests and wicker baby strollers. Attics held the things too personal to discard but were no longer of use.
Attics were often unheated and uninsulated. However, desperate times called for resourcefulness and over the course of the past century some homeowners converted part of the attic into a small bedroom.
We had an attic room like this in our first house, a Merriam Park 1900 Four Square. My wife turned it into a kind of writer's turret, she sat in the cold space and peeked out on Iglehart Avenue from the tiny window in her garret. The 9 x 5 space had a finished wood floor, plastered ceiling, and porcelain chamber pot. The tiny room pulled heat from the brick chimney via a small iron stove. Who slept up there? A servant girl, alone in Saint Paul from Ireland? An away-from-home college student? An elderly uncle with no other family?
After we had kids I converted the entire attic into my workspace. I put in a new roof, new windows, plush (purple) carpet and yes, skylights. The space was ethereal and a favorite place for the family to hang out, especially on cold winter days as there was so much sunlight to bask in! One might reason that attics are closest to heaven and should be full of light.
Dream psychologists proffer that if you dream you are in an attic you are actually in your subconscious, in your memory, or higher thinking. It certainly felt that way to us.
Our latest house is also a turn-of-the-century home. The attic had already been converted by the time we moved in. It already had carpet and windows and a skylight. But when we did an addition on the back of the house we needed to remove the skylight. The attic became a high altitude cave. While comforting, it was not full of light. It was not a place we gravitated to. So I re-envisioned the space and installed two new Velux skylights. (And then new paint, new carpet and some furniture rearrangement. I am an architect, these things cannot be helped.)
The space is once again... heavenly, one might say. And automatic blinds allow for us to darken it in order to watch TV or movies. If you have an older home with an unused attic it might be time to consider the possibilities, and bring some light into your life.
