We are not the ones building the first one
The first Sophab Solarium is going up on my own house in Fredericton. I am not the one building it. Westner Handwerk are, working from the same drawing set our design tool produces — and that distinction is worth more to you than anything else on this page.
Here is why. The question that actually stops people is not "can I afford it" and it is not "will it work". It is who near me would even build this? An arch is an unfamiliar thing to put on a house, and a homeowner is right to worry that they will buy a beautiful set of drawings and then spend six months failing to find anyone willing to price them.
So the useful fact is not that a Solarium exists. It is that a contractor who had never built one read the set, priced it, ordered from it and put it up.
What it is
A 17 ft projection: the arch reaches about seventeen feet out from the wall at its widest, and stands about the height of a two-storey house at the crown. The ribs are built up from dimensional timber in two chords with blocking between them, bent to an ellipse. The shell is polycarbonate rather than glass — lighter, warmer, and it takes a Maritime hailstorm without shattering.
It is not finished
The end walls are still to come. I could have waited until it was done and photographed it from the good side, and I would rather tell you where it actually is. The shell is up and glazed and has been through a summer. It has not been through a winter yet, and when it has, I will show you that too.
What we changed because of it
Several details in the drawing set exist because this build ran into something the drawings did not yet say clearly enough. That is the real reason to do the first one on your own house rather than a customer's: when the set is wrong, it should be my problem and my money, not theirs.
There will be more of these as the end walls go on. If you want to see how the thing you are looking at on the site is actually put together, this is where it gets written down.
All posts
