Open plan offices make great use of available space, helping to cut overheads and, therefore, contributing to greater profits (or lower losses) but there is often a need for a finished off area for conferences or inexpressive meetings. The latest amelioration in this area is a virtual wall of frameless glass doors that can stretch up to eight metres wide yet, when fully open, occupy a tiny footprint against a wall.
The doors are made of tempered glass and slide along guides in the ceiling and floor until they reach a side wall, where they pivot ninety degrees to stack neatly against the wall. The glass has a very slim profile therefore a stack of eight or so doors is barely more than a hand span.
Us Open 2010
The doors may spend many hours stacked out of the way and can be slid back into place in a minute. The first door is turned ninety degrees to slide along the guides to position, followed by each of the other doors until the final one is in place. There is a main door that opens in the original way so that the room can be entered and exited in the usual manner by staff, executives and guests.
The frameless glass stacking door system described should not be confused with a purely sliding doors system or a glass wall with a pair of occasion doors which do not enable maximum entrance in the middle of areas. The slide-pivot-stack glass door system is the only one of these that facilitates a full open plan office environment.
Frameless glass partitions are becoming popular in hotels and large bistro areas to divide areas for inexpressive functions. For further privacy, there are tinted glass options.
Smaller restaurants are having the doors installed as their asset frontage to enlarge their dining areas on great weather days. great than bi-folding doors in terms of narrow profile when fully open and stacked, the slide-pivot-stack recipe is far superior when open part way. This is because the individual doors are either stacked away from the main entrance or they are in place along the guide line to form a window-wall whereas bifolding doors fold together as they slide, leaving a zig-zag protrusion along the remaining guides, wherever the doors have folded.
Developed from the 'glass curtains' conception popular in Europe, frameless glass doors are now available to order, made to measure in England, with facility included in the quoted price.
In expanding to the industrial applications, the frameless glass room dividers are suitable for homes and a double-glazed frameless glass patio door version was launched in Spring 2010 to comply with construction regulations for domestic dwellings. The double-glazed doors are frameless but have a narrow opaque gasket at the sides of the glass panels to seal the cavity in the middle of the panes of glass.
Open Plan Office And Glass Partition Doors For Switchable Privacy