Laurel St, Bellaire: a New Build Glazed in Aluminum

Where this is

Laurel St runs through Bellaire, Texas, ZIP 77401, in Harris County. Bellaire is worth naming precisely, because it is not a Houston neighborhood. It is a separate incorporated city with its own council, its own building department and its own permit counter, and Houston simply surrounds it on every side. A contractor who treats 77401 as “Houston” finds that out at the permit stage rather than on the drawing.

We publish the street, the city, the ZIP and the county. We do not publish house numbers, and we do not publish our clients’ names. If you want to stand in front of a finished job before you commit to one, ask us and we will arrange it with the owner rather than putting their address on the internet.

What the lot asked for

Bellaire has been rebuilding itself for two decades. Single-story post-war houses on generous lots come down, and taller, squarer, glassier houses go up in their place. That pattern is why so much of our work in 77401 is new construction rather than replacement: when we are first called, the openings do not exist yet. They are still lines on an elevation, and they can still be changed.

That is the good case for a window company to be in. On a replacement you inherit whatever the last builder left you and you work to it. Here the window schedule and the framing were settled together, so a corner could be glass instead of brick because somebody checked early that the header could carry it.

The house is white brick with black frames, a combination Houston has settled on for contemporary infill and one that is unforgiving of a bad finish. Against white masonry a frame that chalks or fades has nowhere to hide, which is an argument for a factory finish on aluminum rather than a coating applied to something else.

What went in

An aluminum package covering the whole house. From the photographs: fixed and operable units across the front elevation, full-height glazing along the kitchen wall, floor-to-ceiling fixed panes in the bedrooms, large sliding glass doors out to the covered patio, and a semi-frameless glass panel over the tub in one of the bathrooms.

Aluminum is our premium tier and it is the tier that makes sense on a house shaped like this one. The reason is not durability, whatever a salesperson may have told you. It is that aluminum is stiff, so a frame can be slim and still carry a large pane, and on an elevation designed around glass the width of the frame is the whole point. Put the same opening in vinyl and the sightline thickens. Read the trade-off in full on the aluminum page or side by side with the other two tiers on compare windows.

The patio opening is the one most visitors ask about. Wide sliding panels are a different engineering problem from a standard slider, which is why we keep minimal sliding doors and lift and slide doors as separate product lines rather than as options on one. The shower panel came out of the same shop as the windows, which is the reason the shower glass matches rather than nearly matches.

Why new construction runs differently

On a rebuild the sequence is the job. Units have to be manufactured to the rough openings the framer actually built, not the ones the drawing promised, so somebody has to go and measure the frame after it is up and before the wrap goes on. Miss that window and you are either shimming a gap or cutting structure.

Flashing is the other half, and it is the half that decides whether the wall is dry in five years. We will not hand that to another trade and then warrant the result, which is why installation is ours on a job like this. If you are a builder rather than a homeowner, the way we schedule against a construction program is on the new construction page.