5 Advantages of Walkable Skylights

From Daylighting to Aesthetics, Walkable Skylights Provide These Advantages

From renovations of private residences to new commercial builds, the incorporation of walkable skylights provides a laundry list of benefits. Here’s what walkable skylights are, as well as five compelling reasons to add them in your next remodel or new build.

What Is Walkable Glass?

Walkable glass is just that: architectural glass you can walk on. Common examples include walkable skylights and glass flooring.

When planning your walkable glass project, your number one concern should be safety. Always make sure you work with reputable designers and glass manufacturers who have the experience and expertise to create safe glass flooring.

One crucial aspect of glass floor safety is creating a slip-resistant product, which minimizes the chance of anyone slipping, tripping, or falling on the glass feature. Ask your glass manufacturer for more information about the techniques they use to create antislip glass. (Read here for more information about the four antislip glass techniques Jockimo uses.)

5 Benefits of Installing Walkable Skylights

1. Improve Aesthetics

Glass has been used as an architectural element for thousands of years, and part of its enduring popularity has to do with aesthetics. People love the look of glass. It’s clean, simple, and elegant. In today’s design work, it often lends a space a sense of sophistication and a contemporary, minimalist feel.

2. Enjoy Daylighting

Daylighting is an architectural technique where you strategically place skylights, windows, or any other opening in order to allow natural light to fill a space below. Walkable skylights are a great way to harness the benefits of daylighting. In this way, adding walkable skylights to a home or commercial space provides all the design-oriented benefits, but it also lends practical utility by allowing light into an otherwise dark space below.

3. Get an Airier, More Spacious Feel

If you have a space that feels a bit small, cramped, or crowded, incorporating glass into a renovation project is a great way to open that area up and lend it a more airy, spacious feel.

Physically adding livable square footage to a space can be prohibitively expensive and, depending on the home’s design, can present logistical building difficulties. Walkable skylights are an economical way to make a room feel more expansive and inviting without actually amending the layout of the area.

4. Reap the Benefits of Natural Light

Natural light has well-documented benefits over fluorescent bulbs. Especially if you spend a lot of time in the room below the skylight, be especially open to this option. As with most things, how much natural light affects a person is highly dependent on the individual, but natural light has been shown to do everything from improving the quality of one’s sleep to keeping seasonally dictated depression at bay. For some people, flooding a space with natural light can have tangible health benefits.

5. Reduce Energy Usage

Using natural light to illuminate a space not only provides a more beautiful, comfortable kind of light than artificial bulbs, but it can actually have a positive impact on your energy usage. It can reduce your dependence on light bulbs or other means of artificial light, especially during those long summer days.

Allowing natural light into a space can also help heat a room and minimize your need for heating during the cooler months of the year.

Jockimo is also proud to say we’re the first in the architectural glass industry to offer a walkable skylight with insulated, energy-efficient glass flooring panels. This further adds to the environmentally friendly aspect of installing glass.

Reach Out with Questions

Curious if walkable skylights are right for your home? Want to know more about slip-resistant glass? Have questions about all the benefits of natural light in a space? Whatever the question, reach out. We’re always happy to help!