Walk Towards the Light

"Walk towards the light" is a design principle used by an architect who published a series of books I gobbled up over the past few years: Sarah Susanka, with the Not So Big House series. She has a series of principles and practical suggestions, many of which I've incorporated into my own small house. The "walk towards the light" idea is that people are naturally drawn towards the light, so use that concept in placing windows, hallways, lighting, and lighted art works, to make it comfortable and natural to move around your home. One specific example is my newly renovated basement - I had one additional window excavated to a large size in the big, main room down there, not required for "legal bedroom exit" status, but because it's at the foot of the stairway and faces west. In the afternoon, light streams in from outside, and it draws you down the stairs to the otherwise underground space.

Light is very important to me. I'm convinced the gloom of my middle school years, spent in Ann Arbor and England, was influenced by the gloom over the winters. By contrast, the South Shore of Long Island, heavily influenced by the Atlantic Ocean, is one of the sunniest places in the country during the winter months. Moving back there for my high school years was a life saver. Back to Ann Arbor for college and grad school, we once went 45 days without enough sun to cast a shadow. I remember hunkering down into vegetative status in the winters. Chicago, on the west side of the Great Lakes, was significantly less gloomy in winter than Michigan. But I'm convinced I never would have gotten the gumption to apply for the job in DC if we hadn't had a glorious, stationary, high-pressure system sitting over Chicago for four weeks at just exactly the right time. It was frigid - during that time it never climbed above 5 degrees! But it was light, all day, every (short) day, and I soaked it up, through windows at work and bundling up to go cross-country skiing on weekends.

When I moved to DC, my first office at my new job was an interior one, with no glimpse of the outside. I read a book on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and I was afraid of what the dark would do to me. I had started The Big Weight-loss, and key to that was nordic tracking for a time every single morning. I bought a specialty florescent sunlight lamp on a mounting pole that allowed it to shine in my face as I exercised. This is reckoned to be the absolute best method for use of a lamp to ward off SAD - in your face, first thing upon rising, while exercising. No doubt the energy from the light helped in the weight-loss.

I bought my current house primarily for its windows, secondarily for its lot and the gardening possibilities. (Of course, location came first!) Built in 1950 when tract housing was shooting up all over the U.S., it has several detectable Prairie School influences (in the pitch of the roof and overhangs) and mid-Century modern as well (in the large combination living/dining room, and several modernist touches in materials and trim), rescuing it from the dark, chopped up standards at the time. Shaped like an "L", with the two bedrooms on the base of the "L" and the public rooms along the upright, it's oriented close to north-south, with the bedrooms being the north wing. Every room has big windows, and from almost every spot in the house you can see outdoors on at least two different sides (if doors and blinds are open). But as I've recently spent more days in the house at all hours, I've noticed subleties in the light patterns in these most dark days of the year.

Clearly, the axis of the house is skewed from true north/south, so that east-facing windows get less morning light than west-facing windows get in the afternoon. I move consciously through the house, following the light. I have a "morning chair" in my office with east windows. I usually get up before full light, so the chair has a nice reading spotlight. I sit with my ipad and coffee, catching up on blogs, social media, and the news. The sun is rising behind me - if I turn I can watch it, but as I sit I can see rays in the room, and through to the next room to watch the sun cast light on the trees outside on the west side. I recently also bought a small sunlight lamp, because I found grey days seemed to sap my energy even with consciously trying to get outdoors more. It's a small thing, relatively inexpensive, and I set it up right next to my face as I read, for 15-20 minutes. Maybe it helps - so hard to tell.

My sunny kitchen

By the time it's full light, the kitchen with east and south windows is lovely. That's when I clean up from the night before (yes I go to bed with the dishes undone) and plan the day's activities and meals. Somewhere in there I go to the basement where my workout room gets some natural light from the north, but is very very well lit.

I generally eat breakfast and hang out in my sunroom if I'm home and reading or writing for the morning. This room, known also as the TV room and the dog's room, started life as a screen porch and then was winterized. It has giant windows on the east, south, and west! This makes it a poor TV room in the summer when glare affects the screen most of the time, but it is a lovely place to spend a portion of my day these days. (It's very doggy, and a deep cleaning of furniture and new floor coverings will happen between dogs, whenever that is. For the time being, it works for me and my four-legged guy better than for guests.)

The sunroom in the afternoon.

By the early afternoon, my big room is getting the light. This is where I'll finish out my day. I use my dining room table as working desk when I plunge into finances and paperwork. I flop on the living room couch with books or the ipad. My bedroom faces west and north, and any cleaning, organizing, or decorating projects in there are likely to be kicked off in the late afternoon during its brief time of streaming light.

During these dark days, I also pay attention to the spectrum and intensity of my interior lighting. In both my bedroom and my living room I have intense daylight spectrum lightbulbs I use in the daytime, but I try to avoid them in the evening. My bedside reading light is specifically a red-spectrum evening light, and I invested in a fancy alarm clock that gradually runs through the spectrum from red to blue light as the way to wake up. (I'm not using the alarm clock most days these days. Don't hate me for being retired.)

This pattern of moving around the house with the sun actually started unconsciously. Now that I've noticed it, I've decided to adopt it as a default routine. I'm like a photophillic phototropic plant. I like the light and I follow it!