Aria Isle Dr, The Woodlands: a Waterfront House Built Around Glass

Where this is

Aria Isle Dr is in The Woodlands, Texas, ZIP 77380, in Montgomery County. The Woodlands is not part of the City of Houston. It is a planned community run as a township, about thirty miles north of our shop at 7248 Wynnpark Drive up Interstate 45, and that is ordinary working distance for our crews.

As on every job we publish, we name the street, the community, the ZIP and the county. We do not publish the house number or the owner. If you want to see a finished job in person, ask us and we will arrange it with the owner rather than putting their address online.

A house designed around its openings

This is the kind of house where the window schedule is the architecture. The front is a composition of solid planes and one tall stack of glass at the entry. The back opens almost entirely toward the water, with multi-panel sliding doors on the ground floor and large fixed panes above them. Through the middle of the plan runs a glazed atrium, so light reaches the stair and the upper landing from inside the house as well as from outside it.

Openings that size are the reason this job is aluminum. Aluminum is stiff, so a frame can stay slim while it carries a large pane, and on a wall that is mostly glass the width of the frame is what you actually see. The same opening in vinyl would need a heavier frame. The trade-off is laid out on the aluminum page and side by side with the other tiers on compare windows.

What went in

From the photographs: the double-height fixed glazing at the entry, large fixed picture windows in the corner rooms, multi-panel sliding doors and four-panel sliders along the water side, and the glass walls of the central atrium and the interior courtyard. For wide sliding openings like these we keep minimal sliding doors and lift and slide doors as separate product lines, because a heavy panel that has to glide for years is a different engineering problem from a standard patio slider. Fixed panes like the entry stack are on the fixed windows page.

A west or south-facing wall of glass in Texas also needs the right glass, not just the right frame. That conversation, about coatings and heat gain, happens at the specification stage, and it is part of the free measure and custom design visit.

Building on the water

New construction runs on the builder's program, so units are made to the rough openings the framer actually built, measured after framing and before the wall is wrapped. On a waterfront lot the weather side matters more than usual, and the flashing around each opening is what keeps the wall dry for the next twenty years. That is why installation is ours on a job like this. Builders can read how we schedule against a construction program on the new construction page.