Dormer windows

DORMER WINDOWS CAN BE KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL LOFT CONVERSION PROJECT - HERE'S HOW TO GET THEM RIGHT

- SARAH WARWICK

If you want to boost your home's usable square meterage, using the space underneath the roof is a great way to do it - and dormer windows could make a compact conversion feasible. In its simplest terms, a dormer window is a vertical window that projects from the slope of a roof, and has its own roof. This type of window can be used to bring light into a converted loft - while a rooflight could do the same, the benefit of a dormer is that it creates additional headroom and boosts the usable floor area of a room in the roof.

There are different types of dormer window, and the variations mostly come down to the shape of the dormer's roof. The most common is the gable-fronted dormer window, which has a pitched roof sloping to either side, but a dormer window can also have a hipped roof of three sloping planes that meet at the ridge. There are also flat-roof dormers with a more or less horizontal top surface, and shed dormers, where a flat roof slopes in the same direction as the roof but at a shallower angle. An eyebrow or eyelid dormer, meanwhile, has no sides, but its roof curves up and over the window. Here, we drill down into the benefits of dormer windows, with help from experts on the subject.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DORMER AND A GABLE WINDOW?