Glass Rail: the next step in the wall-of-glass revolution
Patrick Burke, national sales director of Exlabesa Architecture UK, charts the soaring popularity of products designed to maximise the use of glass, and how his company’s new Glass Rail balustrade system is the natural next step in their evolution.
Cutting-edge architecture is dominated by one material – glass.
Look at the world’s most ambitious and spectacular buildings, and they’re covered in it – and even in more humble homes and businesses, it’s being used more extensively than ever.
Why? Because millions of us are forced to spend hours of our lives indoors when we’d much rather be outside. For hundreds of years, that was often an unpleasant experience – buildings were dark and cold, and windows were an expensive luxury.
So in part, the modern love of glass is a reaction to that. It lets us blur the lines between inside and outside and enjoy the natural world around us even when we’re stuck in the house or the office.
Walls of glass
You can see it in the evolution of home improvement over the last 30 years. Spurred by that desire for space and light, designers have worked to incorporate more and more glass in their products, and fewer and fewer structural elements.
It began with larger windows that let in more light and offered better views. Then came the rise of the bi-fold door. That was followed by soaring popularity for ultra-slim sliding doors that resembled walls of glass.
The natural next step in that process is products like Exlabesa’s Glass Rail. We’ve reached the stage where door products are almost totally made of glass, with extremely few vertical components to spoil the view.
Glass Rail takes that same principle and applies it to another type of product which, while very important, often obstructed views and blocked out light – safety barriers.
The Glass Rail balustrade system, 100% manufactured in the Exlabesa Doncaster factory, has been designed to balance sleek, stylish aesthetics and uncompromising safety performance, while offering building users uninterrupted views.
Creating the effect of a solid wall of glass, Glass Rail can be fully integrated into the building envelope. It has four options for fixing to the base support and can be fixed to the floor framing either internally or on one of the profile flanks.
What’s more, when design requirements necessitate taking the glass pane surface to the limit, the system can be installed on the front of the floor framing.
Glass Rail has also undergone rigorous safety testing and it has been approved under BS-6180 balustrade regulations using toughened laminated glass and four anchor fixings per lineal metre.
The product is available in stock both in anodised and mill finishes, and a wide range of colours are available with 15 days lead time.
It’s also been extensively tested, including to BS-6180, and can handle loads up to 0.74kN.
Set for success
With Glass Rail, we challenged ourselves to make a glass balustrade product that excelled on all fronts – delivering robust safety, a wide range of aesthetic options and easy fabrication and installation.
We’re extremely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve with Glass Rail and we’re confident it will go on to become a huge success in the UK market.