Architectural glass

Double and triple glazing and safety glass — made to size in our own plant.

People shop for frames, but glass is most of the window. In a typical opening it is around eighty percent of the area, so the glass — not the profile — decides how warm the room is, how much street noise gets in, and whether the pane is safe to walk into. We cut, temper, laminate and seal it ourselves rather than ordering it in.

An insulated unit is two or three panes held apart by a spacer bar, the cavity filled with argon and the whole perimeter sealed twice. The low-emissivity coating does the real work: a metallic layer a few atoms thick that lets sunlight in but reflects your heating back into the room instead of letting it radiate out through the glass. Because the units are built here, each one is made to the exact size of its opening and reaches site quickly.

Safety glass comes two ways and they are not interchangeable. Tempered glass is heated and cooled rapidly to lock its surface in compression — several times stronger than ordinary glass, and if it finally does break it collapses into small blunt granules rather than blades. Laminated glass is panes bonded to a plastic interlayer: it cracks but stays standing, which is why balustrades and overhead glazing are always laminated and never tempered alone. Nothing can be cut or drilled after tempering, so holes and edges are finished before the glass goes near the furnace.