Doors & Glass Products

Choosing a Glass Door: Start With Three Questions

There are a lot of glass door types and the choice is simpler than the catalogue suggests. Three questions narrow it almost completely.

How wide is the opening? Under about eight feet, almost anything works. Wider than that and you are into sliding, multi-slide, bifold or a pair — and the question becomes how much of the opening has to actually clear.

Is there space to swing a leaf? If not, the choice is sliding or nothing. This single answer eliminates half the options on most jobs.

How exposed is it? A sheltered rear elevation tolerates almost any specification. An exposed terrace, a waterfront elevation or a street entrance on a windy corner needs compression sealing and a threshold designed for water arriving under pressure.

Residential

Patio doors covers the whole range — hinged French pairs, which seal best and clear the full opening; sliding, which projects nowhere but opens to about half its width; lift-and-slide, which drops onto compression seals and gives hinged-door performance in a sliding format; and bifold, which clears the most opening and is the hardest to keep weathertight.

Balcony doors are their own problem because of wind pressure at height, the danger of an outward leaf catching a gust, and the case for laminated glass above ground level.

Sliding doors covers the mechanisms in detail, including pocket systems and the flush threshold trade-off.

Commercial

Storefront doors are specified by stile width against traffic, with clear or bronze anodized finish. Frameless entrances carry everything on patch fittings, which means every hole is made before tempering. Commercial doors covers panic hardware, accessible opening force and fire-rated assemblies. Building entrances are about latching reliably and integrating access control.

Interior and Wet Areas

Frameless systems for partition doors, and shower enclosures for wet areas, where tempered glass is required by code and the enclosure is templated on site after tiling.

Three Things That Apply to Every Glass Door

Safety glazing is required in doors and in the panels beside them — tempered or laminated, by code rather than by choice. Laminated is the better choice at ground level and above.

Hardware is sized to the leaf and the traffic, not chosen from a catalogue. An undersized closer will not pull a door shut against wind, and a door that does not latch is a security failure.

The threshold decides whether it leaks. Drainage, end dams and fall direction matter more than the sealant, and a flush threshold on an exposed elevation needs designing rather than specifying.

Where We Work

We supply and install glass doors across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.

Tell us the opening width and height, whether there is space to swing a leaf, which way the elevation faces, and what the door is for. That is enough for us to recommend a type and give you a realistic figure. If the building is in a historic district, say so early — the approval will narrow the options before anything else does.