Scope of Work
This stretch of Flatbush Avenue across from Kings Plaza is one of the busiest retail corridors in south Brooklyn, and a showroom here lives or dies by its glass: what is on display has to be visible from a moving car. The building is a one-storey black brick box with a long frontage. We replaced the entire storefront — every lite, the bulkhead framing and both entry doors — with a custom-fabricated aluminium storefront system in black, glazed with Solarban 60 low-E insulated units from Oldcastle, and fitted custom doors with the buzzer entry built into the frame.
A custom storefront equal to Kawneer
The owner wanted the quality of a name-brand commercial storefront without being tied to a catalogue size and a factory lead time. So we fabricated the framing ourselves to the same class as Kawneer’s standard commercial storefront: the same narrow sightlines, the same frame depth, thermally improved profiles, centre-glazed pockets sized for 1-inch insulated units, and the same structural approach of continuous verticals with horizontals notched between them. “Equal to Kawneer” is a specification we take seriously — it means a Kawneer shop drawing would fit our frame and ours would fit theirs — and fabricating in-house let us cut every mullion to the actual opening after survey rather than to a nominal size.
The result on the street is a long, uninterrupted run of full-height glass on a low bulkhead, with verticals kept to a minimum so the display behind them reads as one room. On the corner office building at 3915 Flatlands Avenue, a short drive away, we installed Kawneer itself; a visitor walking between the two would be hard pressed to tell which is which.
Solarban 60 glass by Oldcastle
A glass-fronted showroom on a wide open avenue takes a lot of sun. The insulated units here carry Vitro’s Solarban 60 low-E coating, fabricated into 1-inch IGUs by Oldcastle. Solarban 60 is the standard commercial choice for exactly this reason: it lets most of the visible light through — the glass reads clear from the sidewalk, not tinted — while cutting the solar heat that would otherwise turn a glass-fronted showroom into a greenhouse and fade what is on display. The same coating went into 2518 Ocean Avenue, so we know how it behaves over a Brooklyn summer.
Custom doors with the buzzer built in
A showroom that carries appliances, stone and furniture needs to control who walks in after hours without looking like a fortress. Both entry doors are custom full-glass aluminium storefront doors in the same black finish as the framing, and the buzzer entry is part of the door rather than an add-on: the electric release sits in the frame, the wiring runs inside the hollow aluminium, and the button and intercom connect back to the counter. Nothing is surface-mounted and nothing was drilled through a finished frame on site. During the day the doors work as ordinary push-pull storefront doors; after hours staff release them from inside.
Black storefront on a black building
Black storefront on black brick is now the look of this corridor — we did the same on Flatbush Avenue at Grand Prix Custom and on Coney Island Avenue — and the photographs here were taken at the grand opening, banners and pavement samples included.
Photographs
Photographed from the sidewalk at the store’s grand opening; the banners, signage and samples against the glass are the tenant’s.
Seen from inside, the storefront section has a single medium-stile door with a surface-mounted closer, a fixed transom above it and full-height fixed lites to each side.
Similar Work and Related Specifications
Commercial Storefront Systems · Storefront Doors · Low-E Glass · Insulated Glass Units · Storefront Repair · Our Work in Brooklyn · 3915 Flatlands Avenue — Kawneer Storefront at Kings Plaza · Grand Prix Custom, Flatbush Avenue — Storefront and ACM Facade
Planning Something Similar?
A storefront replacement on a live retail street needs a survey, a fabrication plan and a sequence that keeps the shop trading. Send us photos of the frontage and we will measure, quote a custom storefront equal to Kawneer with the glass and door hardware specified, and schedule the install around your opening.