Insights

Frame first, leaf second, architrave last. Six steps, and the reason each one has to happen in that order.

An industrial building in a hot, humid, dusty climate needs a different window from a house. What we specified for a warehouse project in Ghana, and why the decisions were made that way.

Falling glass is rarely a glass problem. It is a fixing, sealant or maintenance problem that has been building for years. Six failure sources, and the inspection that catches them before something lands.

One sash, two opening modes, and a hardware set that costs more than a casement. Tilt-and-turn wins on ventilation control and cleaning access, and it fails on specification shortcuts.

Tempered glass fails spontaneously for two reasons: thermal stress, and nickel sulfide inclusions that were in the float glass before it was ever toughened. The second is predictable, and heat-soak testing is how it is addressed.

A full-glass aluminum sectional door turns a garage into a room with daylight and a view, and asks the building to handle far more solar gain, weight and privacy than a solid door does.

Steel gives the highest strength per millimeter of any common entrance material, and the lowest tolerance for a bad installation. Where it wins, where it rusts, and what the frame has to be.

A casement door is the highest-performance way to open a wall to a garden, and the easiest to get wrong. What the hardware, threshold and frame depth actually need to be.

A wooden entrance door ranges from a few hundred dollars for a stock slab to several thousand for a custom leaf with sidelights. The price is set by five variables, and only one of them is the wood.