Whether you’re operating a restaurant, a retail space, something in the hospitality sector, or any other business venture, a walkable skylight can offer many benefits to your commercial building. Here are the top advantages offered by this architectural glass feature.

5 Ways Walkable Skylights Enhance a Business

• Financial Advantages of a Walkable Skylight

Any commercial space should think of a walkable skylight as an investment. Skylights create a more visually appealing environment for patrons, which helps them have more positive experiences in your establishment. This, in turn, promotes people to return and spend more money.

Walkable skylights can help any building harness the benefits of natural light, and that investment in the feel and atmosphere of a space can have a big tangible financial payoff.

• Preservation of Square Footage

With a traditional skylight or window, you have to sacrifice that space to accommodate the feature. With a walkable skylight, there’s no need to lose that square footage.

Whether you’re incorporating the skylight into a rooftop, elevated deck, or walkway, you get to enjoy all the benefits of that skylight—without taking away from the available space.

Due to the safety features built into architectural glass, walkable skylights can also cover larger expanses than more traditional skylights or window options. Because they are safe to walk on and can accommodate weight, you can also allow more patrons to occupy that space. Again, this contributes to the financial advantage of including walkable skylights in your commercial space.

• Blending of Interior and Exterior Design Elements

A walkable skylight is a great way to bring the beauty, freshness, and light of outside into a building. From an interior design perspective, a walkable skylight blends indoor and outdoor settings in a seamless and appealing manner.

This creates connectivity between an exterior space, such as rooftop dining, and the interior of a building. From the inside, it also fosters an airy, open, bright environment.

Thinking about adding this feature to your commercial space? Here are four key design considerations for your walkable skylight.

• Sight Lines from Exterior to Interior

A walkable skylight more seamlessly unifies the indoor and outdoor spaces. Most prominently, this opens sight lines between the inside and the outside of commercial space.

From a logistical and design perspective, you’ll have to decide how visually open you want your space to be. For example, if patrons will be occupying that space, there could be modesty issues to consider. If that’s something of concern, look into options such as frosted glass. This gives you the advantage of natural light without the privacy concerns of clear glass.

• Contemporary Aesthetic

Glass lends any space a distinctly sleek, modern, and contemporary look. It can also make the interior space brighter and airier. Natural light can even help a space appear bigger.

These design elements make walkable skylights a popular choice for renovations and new builds because they’re an easy, functional way to modernize a building.

You will have to decide if this contemporary look is a good fit for your establishment. If, for example, your business operates out of a historic building, the modernity of glass might feel at odds with the rest of the space. This is a design choice you and your design and build team will need to navigate.

Walkable Skylights versus Traditional Skylights

It’s important to note that walkable skylights differ significantly from traditional skylights. While traditional skylights are not intended to sustain significant weight, walkable skylights are specifically designed to be load-bearing.

As an integrated part of the existing flooring, walkable skylights are also flush. A traditional skylight is usually raised from the level of the roof or floor, which could pose a tripping or falling hazard.

---

Reach Out with Questions

If you’d like to learn more about the relative advantages of adding a walkable skylight to your commercial space, don’t hesitate to contact us.

As a custom glass manufacturer, we’re always happy to answer questions or to talk through the specifics of what’s possible with your project!