Shower Panels & Enclosures

Fixed Panels and Walk-In Screens

Not every enclosure needs a door. A fixed panel — a walk-in screen, a wet room screen — is often the better answer, and it is worth understanding when.

It is the easiest arrangement to keep clean, because there are no hinges, no seals and no channels holding water. It needs no clearance to swing. And it is usually the least expensive frameless option because there is less hardware.

What it requires is depth. The enclosure has to be deep enough that spray does not reach the opening. Get that wrong and you have a permanently wet bathroom floor, which is the most common complaint about walk-in showers and is a design problem rather than a glass one. We will tell you at survey if the space is too shallow for a screen to work without a return panel.

Support: The Part That Gets Underestimated

A fixed panel of 1/2″ glass is heavy and it is cantilevered off one edge. Supporting it properly is the whole job.

Wall channel along the full height of the fixed edge gives the most support and the most tolerance for an out-of-plumb wall, at the cost of a visible channel.

Clamps at two or three points look cleaner and demand a truer wall, because there is nothing to take up a variation.

Support bars from the top of the panel to a wall or ceiling brace the free edge. On a tall or wide panel these are not optional — without one the panel will flex when touched, which feels alarming even when it is structurally adequate.

Floor-to-ceiling poles are used where a panel needs support in the middle of a space with no wall to fix to.

In every case the fixings go into the substrate behind the tile, never into tile alone. Tile will crack under a cantilevered load, and then the panel is loose and the tiling is damaged.

Why We Template

Tiled walls are almost never plumb and almost never parallel. A panel cut to nominal dimensions leaves a tapering gap at one edge, which cannot be sealed reliably and looks wrong.

We make a physical template of the actual opening after tiling is complete and fabricate to it. Ordering glass before the tiling is finished is a false economy, and glass is made to size and cannot be trimmed afterwards.

Where walls are badly out of true, the honest recommendation is sometimes a channel on one side rather than forcing a frameless clamp fit and accepting a visible taper. We will say which.

Sealing

Seal the wall junctions and the base where the panel meets the tray or floor. That is all. The point of the arrangement is that water runs down the glass and back into the enclosure, so over-sealing a panel simply traps water where it cannot drain.

The threshold or tray has to fall back into the enclosure. If it falls outward, nothing sealed to the glass will save you.

Where Panels Suit the Bathroom

These describe the kind of work each area brings rather than any specific client project.

Large bathrooms — Dyker Heights, Todt Hill, Manhattan Beach, Bergen County. Deep walk-in enclosures where a screen alone works because there is room for the spray. Larger panels mean 1/2″ glass and proper bracing.

High-end apartments — Upper East Side, Tribeca, Downtown Brooklyn. Low-iron glass against pale stone, where the green cast of standard clear is obvious at panel thickness.

Brownstone and rowhouse bathrooms — Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Bed-Stuy. Small rooms and walls that have moved over a century. Frequently the case for a channel rather than clamps, and sometimes the case for a return panel because the room is not deep enough for a screen alone.

Renovations with contractors — Staten Island and New Jersey. The scheduling point matters: glass is templated after tiling and takes time to fabricate, so it belongs in the programme rather than being ordered at the end.

Send us the dimensions and a photograph, and tell us whether the tiling is done. See also our shower doors page. We fabricate and install across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.