How To Renovate

EP53 The Light Episode: Transform Your Home with Natural Light

• Tash South

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Light isn't just about brightening a space, it fundamentally transforms how we feel in our homes. When you walk into a light-filled room, there's an immediate sense of warmth and energy that simply can't be replicated with artificial lighting.

In this episode I share a personal experience of how dramatically different educational environments—one dark and oppressive, one flooded with natural light—shaped my understanding of how buildings affect our emotional state. When I think back to it, this early awareness really formed the foundation of my approach to using light as a tool in renovation. Light shouldn't be a luxury or an afterthought, it should be prioritised in every project.

Whether you're planning a complete renovation or looking for simpler improvements, this episode explores practical solutions to bring more light into your home. 

So join me inside where I chat through some tips like adding strategic roof lights, stealing borrowed light, and more.
Your home should support your well-being and form the framework for your busy life, and by understanding the power of light and implementing some of these strategies, you can create a home that energises and restores.

I’ll see you there!

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Hi I'm your host, Tash South I'm an Interior Designer and Renovation Consultant.
Each episode of How To Renovate is short, but brimming with practical advice to help you manage your renovation project with confidence and success.

Grab some more renovation advice & free resources and become part of the South Place Studio Renovation Community at
https://www.southplacestudio.com/freebies

Everything I teach about renovation falls within my Five Pillar Process for A Successful Renovation, to learn more about the process, head to
https://www.southplacestudio.com/pillars


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Speaker 1:

Hey, hey, hello everybody, and welcome back to the how to Renovate podcast. It's Tash here, and I hope that your week is going well so far. I hope your renovation planning is going amazingly well and, as usual, I'm here every Wednesday to help you along with that. So let's get into the episode. This week, I am talking about one of my favourite subjects when it comes to renovating, and that is light. So we are talking about transforming your home with natural light, so letting in the light and using light as a kind of a renovation tool almost in the home. It's something I talk about a lot, and every single project I approach, I'm always thinking about the light first. I'm always thinking about how we can bring in more natural light into the home, because I just feel light is so important to us, to our wellbeing, to how we feel in a space. I just think that natural light influences how we feel in a space more than we even realise. Because, think about it, when you walk into a space that's just bathed in natural light, just think about how you feel when you first walk into that space or into that room. You just feel, don't? You just feel lighter, warmer, more energized, and so I just think that bringing that into our own homes is so important. For me it's, it's foundational. It's not just about what it makes the space look like, or the brightness or the aesthetics and I know this from personal experience. It shapes our energy, our mood, how we feel.

Speaker 1:

I've talked about before how I grew up in Cape Town, south Africa, and how we just had so much more daylight there every single year, and now I live in London, here in the UK, where it is just grey and cloudy a lot. Our summers are shorter and I really feel how that affects my mood and I think you don't always have to be from a different, warmer country to feel the effects of that. I know for a while that people who have lived here all of their lives feel the effects of that as well, and I think that's where they is when people get that urge that they want to go away, that like they must go on holiday to a warmer place or spend some time in the sun, and it's it's kind of crucial. I feel like it's crucial to to our well-being and how we feel, and you know I always say that our home should support us and form this framework for our lives, and I just feel that light is a huge part of that, because it energizes, it restores, and so when you feel the warmth on your skin and you see the light, that just energizes you, gets you ready for the next day. It makes your home feel warm and welcoming and like a place you want to spend time in. As you know by now, everything I teach falls under my five pillar process, and the information in this episode falls under pillar one planning. Let's start with number one everybody, our emotional connection to light and to mood.

Speaker 1:

I know about this one quite well on a really personal level, and I have told this story before on the podcast. But, as I said, I grew up in Cape Town, south Africa, and it was during the apartheid years, so everything was racially segregated, including our schooling, up until the age of about around 13, 14 for me. So I spent my entire primary years, my primary school years, in what was a then known as a coloured only primary school, and of course, the way the regime worked was that, you know, our facilities as people of colour were not nearly as good as they were for white people in society. That's just what the regime was. It was racial segregation, and so I spent all of my primary school years in a building, a school building that was dark, it was cramped, it was dusty, there was no nature around it, we didn't have any trees or grass, it was pretty much hard surfaces dark old buildings, hard surfaces, dark old buildings. And when it came to around 1994, we were then apartheid was starting to be dismantled and we were allowed then to integrate and to go to schools that other kids of colour had never been allowed to go to before, and so I ended up going to a high school, a secondary school, that was completely and utterly different to my primary school.

Speaker 1:

So I ended primary school in one summer and then, a few weeks later, after the summer break, I started high school in this completely different school, completely, completely different building, set of surroundings. And that school, my high school, was a completely different building. It had this entrance hallway, this foyer, which had floor to ceiling windows. It was a double height space with these two staircases going up, and I just remember walking in as a young girl I was probably 13 years old and instantly feeling the difference between those two spaces and how our surroundings and our environment affect us. And so, when I was in the primary school, the darker school. It actually even now when I think back to it, it felt oppressive, it felt dark, and when I think of the high school it just felt so much lighter and I actually felt like a different person in those two different places. That might sound like a really strange thing to say, but even at that young age I could feel the difference and that was to do with the light. I totally believe that was to do with the light. Also the surroundings. I think the nature made a huge difference. You could actually see out of the building through these huge glass windows and doors. You could see the surrounding fields the school had fields and trees and so on and so I think that made such a difference to how I then saw buildings and my surroundings and I was aware of that from a very young age.

Speaker 1:

So I think that emotional connection to light and mood for me has come from there. But I think lots of us have it. I think it's literally a human thing. I think we all have it and I think that's why people suffer from SAD, seasonal affective disorder. It's because you know that impact of the, the winter light, especially in the darker countries like here in the UK and even further north, you know the Nordic countries and so on. It has a huge impact on people's well-being not having that light and, in the winter months, how our mood dips and how we feel in those months, months and so I think it's even more important here in these countries to focus on light in our buildings, in our surroundings, and find ways to bring those in, even in those winter months, if at least even if it gets light later and gets dark earlier, at least during the hours where there is light and we're indoors, we can. We can benefit from it because that light is filtering into our homes. So I think that's why I'm so passionate about bringing light into homes, into our spaces.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's move on to number two. I want to talk to you about why light is underrated and why it can be used as a renovation tool, and why it's the most underrated renovation tool. I don't think light is a bonus. I think light should be a given and we should bring it in wherever we can, and I know lots of properties don't always lend themselves to that, but I think we should always make the best of it. We should find ways that are possible that we can bring light into our spaces, because I just think light is kind of it's one of the building blocks of our wellbeing and how we live in our spaces and how we function in our spaces, because, you know, it affects our circadian rhythms, it affects our productivity, our sense of calm.

Speaker 1:

So it's just so, so important to me and I just think it's absolutely just wild how people sometimes renovate and they extend without considering the light. They'll add big kitchen extensions to the back of their houses but they'll forget about that middle part. Especially if you're in a terrace house, that middle part can often be quite dark and I think you really need to work with that. You need to find a way to bring as much light into the extended part so that it can filter through into that center, and sometimes that's not always possible. But there are ways that you can trick the light into there, which we'll talk about in this episode a bit as well.

Speaker 1:

For me, sometimes the main reason I've renovated was to bring in more light. So I think really think about how you can do that and the importance of it as well, because more natural light can make a room feel bigger, feel warmer, feel cleaner, even and even more luxurious, and so don't forget about light it is. I see it as a renovation tool and I think it is a very underrated renovation tool as well, so do not forget about this one. Okay, so, moving on to number three, let's actually talk about how you can bring more light into your home. So, of course, there's various ways you can bring light into your home larger windows and doors, or adding windows and doors the obvious one, but also never forget the roof. Roof lights are amazing for bringing in more light. You get more light from the same sized roof light than you would a window that's on the side of the home. It actually brings more light into the home. So even adding a small roof light will drastically increase the amount of light filtering into your home. So if you're doing a kitchen extension or you're doing a loft conversion, don't forget about those roof lights and think wherever you have the opportunity, think about where you can place them.

Speaker 1:

In a project I carried out last year, project Alexandra, I added a loft conversion. It was a first floor apartment. We did a loft conversion with a double dormer. Loft conversion with a double dormer and, in addition to the standard roof lights, the kind of velux roof lights that you see on roof extensions, on the slope of the roof. I also added roof lights to the flat part of the roof, so I had a tiny one on top of the shower. That's really all we could fit in between the structure as it was, but right on top of the shower. So as you were in the shower you could look up at the sky and just feel the benefit of that light, first thing in the morning, and so I just think that's really important to well-being, and then also in the kitchen.

Speaker 1:

The. The kitchen was really dark. It was at the back of the house. It already had two, in fact three, windows, but it was still dark, and so just adding one roof light above the island not huge, I think, it was one meter by one meter totally transformed how that room felt. It literally felt like a completely different space and you actually wanted to be in there, whereas before it just felt a bit dark and dank and a bit depressing. But just adding the roof light and then working with the light, using light colour on the cabinetry and on the walls and so on, elevated that space like you would not believe.

Speaker 1:

And there are even more advanced solutions now. You can find sun tunnels where you can actually redirect light via a flexible kind of pipe to a place where it might have been difficult to get light to before. So sun tunnels are amazing and they could be really great for those, those middle parts of terrace homes when you're extending to bring some light through. And then, of course, really simple solutions that can make a huge difference, like swapping out a solid exterior door for one with glass panels in it. Huge difference If you have a dark room, like a kitchen, and it's got a solid door, just adding a glazed door will bring in so much more light. Same for your hallway. If you're adding, if you're swapping out a solid door for one with glass panels, it brings so much more light into the front of your home, into the hallway, which is supposed to be a really welcoming space, and so you don't want it to feel dark and unwelcoming. And you can use that same trick internally as well. So if you have, let's say, a dark utility room but a light kitchen, you can put a glazed door between those two and then steal that light into the darker utility room. Or you can go even more drastic. You can, of course, make openings into walls, remove walls, make sure that light definitely filters through by widening door openings or making your space more open plan.

Speaker 1:

And then that moves us on to number four everybody, which is borrowed light. So I love this one. So if you can bring more light into some areas of the home or perhaps you just naturally have more light in some areas of the home but you'd like more light in the darker areas of the home there are some tricks you could do to borrow that light and bring it into your darker spaces. So we can go back to what we just talked about in terms of the internal glazing, internal windows, and remember they don't always have to be clear. You could use opaque, you could use reeded. There's various types of glass that you can still use to maintain any privacy that you might want to keep. So those are obviously great for things like bathrooms or areas that you still want to keep private but you still want to keep. So those are obviously great for things like bathrooms or areas that you still want to keep private, but you still want to get that borrowed light into the space.

Speaker 1:

And then the next one is mirrors. Mirrors are so clever for borrowed light and if you place them strategically. They can reflect light back into the darker spaces, so they can steal the light from the lighter spaces and then reflect them into the darker spaces. And I just think mirrors are amazing for this. So you can use them cleverly. They can either just be framed mirrors placed, you can use mirror tiles, you can get mirrored panels. There are various ways that you can use mirrors to make spaces seem lighter as well. And I think it's important to note here that even if the light can't physically reach the space, our brains can still respond to the suggestion of light. So if it's the reflection of light or the reflection of a window in a darker space, that still has a positive impact on our brains. So I just think that's even more reason to try this, to use the borrowed light wherever you can in your home.

Speaker 1:

And then, moving on to the last point, here, everybody, we're talking about number five small tweaks, big impact. So perhaps you're not doing a complete renovation, but you just want to benefit from some more light in your home. Sometimes just little changes can make a huge difference, and so I think now you know how I feel about light. I mean, I will adjust a room layout to benefit from the light better, if I have to, so you can make small tweaks to benefit from the light that your home does have. If you're not renovating, like in your bedroom, if you love the morning light and you love waking up to the morning light, is there a way that you can flip your bed or turn your bed to face the window or to be in a better position to actually experience that morning light as it's coming in to the home in the morning? Or that really simple tip that I shared before perhaps your kitchen's dark and you're not doing a huge renovation, but perhaps it does have a solid door and you can swap that solid door out for a glazed door to benefit from the light. Or perhaps there's an opportunity to put a glazed panel between a lighter room and a darker room, so it doesn't have to be a huge renovation.

Speaker 1:

But there are really clever ways that you can filter light through your home, borrow light through your home, and so I really hope that this episode inspires you to bring more light into your home, because I guarantee you're going to feel better in your home if you have more natural light. So I hope today's episode has got you kind of looking around your space and just thinking about how you can bring in light if you're renovating. And if you're renovating, let it be one of the first things you think about. One of the most important things you think about in your renovation, as a renovation tool, is light Bringing in that light and seeing where you can bring it in, how you can bring it in and how it's going to affect how you move around your home and how you use your home and how you feel. I really think that light is not a luxury. I actually feel quite hard done by that. As a child, you know, we were made to spend time in these dark, dingy classrooms with windows so high up and so small that we barely even felt the light in the room, and so I really know how big a difference it can make to to how you feel and how you learn and how you work and how productive you are. It makes a huge difference to have a well-lit space. But I think we'll end the episode there, everybody, I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, and you think anyone else could benefit from it, please share this episode with them. I'd really appreciate it and hopefully it will help them bring some more light into their homes as well. But it's bye for now, everybody. I'm so glad you spent this time with me to talk about light and how we can bring that into your home, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. It's bye for now.

Speaker 1:

For more information on my five pillar process for successful renovation, you can go directly to southplacestudiocom forward slash pillars, where you'll find an introduction to the process which covers each of the pillars and what they cover. We also have a number of other free renovation resources. Go now to southplacestudiocom forward slash freebies. I have created some amazing freebies for you there. There is one on the process, like we just said. There is one on planning permission. There is one on kitchen design. There is another one on lighting planning. Go and check those out. There's so much free information there to help you with your renovation.