Stairs

Look through the lower windows and you can see where the team built a retaining wall. This allowed for the windows to extend down into the lower level and provide more light. Speaking of light, Simmons designed a 2-foot gap down the stairs and placed eight pendants in different sizes at eight different heights from the second floor all the way down to the lower level. These entice travel up and down the stairs. The windows themselves are aluminum-clad on the exterior and wood painted black on the interior. They pick up on the black steel stair railings.

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Use daylight as a highlighter. Daylight is the most wonderful magnifier of interior spaces. If you can bring more natural light into your home, it will have a great effect in maximizing the sense of space — and even in an already opened-up area, this is generally a benefit. It does need to be done intelligently, however, as too much daylight flooding in — particularly too much direct sunlight — can be overwhelming, reducing overall contrast and bleaching everything out (and reducing the impact of all of your carefully created layers). So try to use daylight to create highlight points among the layers, enhancing the visual separation and creating greater depth.

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