I am renovating a place I've just bought at latitude 49 N. (It's the larger part of a house from the 1930s.) The main living area (which I will use as a library/study/music room) is a long room with SES exposure. The long wall facing the windows will get direct sunlight on winter mornings, but not otherwise. Much of it will need to be filled with bookcases.
Obviously, I want to use the direct sunlight.
* One simple way of "using it" is to create a reading nook or two for, well, reading comfortably while laying down. It would be nice if such a nook were surrounded by material that could store heat for a little while and then gradually release it onto the reader in the afternoon or evening. I thought of dark wood, but then that probably releases heat too quickly for the purpose. Or doesn't it? Is one kind of wood (or some similar material (e.g. fibreboard) that you can cover with wood veneer) better than another for this purpose? Anything that looks good under and beneath bookcases would do, really.
* It might make sense to build bookcases with solid wooden back boards, so that the radiant heat from the morning winter sun will not just dissipate into the building walls. (I'm not planning on adding insulation to inside walls.) Again, is there a kind of wood that would hold the heat a little and release it in the course of the day? (Is the answer simply "any dark wood"?) It obviously doesn't have to be something tremendously fancy - I like pine, oak, etc. Or is something other than wood (that you can make back boards of bookcases out of) better?
(Of course ceiling-to-floor bookcases with heavy back boards are functionally equivalent to bookcases with no backboards against solid wood panelling.) |