Hampshire Major Home Renovation with Danish Windows

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A complex renovation in the South of England – every room in the customer’s home benefitted from a full makeover. We’re very happy to have played our part in reinventing this stunning property.

The customer asked us for a product that was low maintenance and offered significantly-improved airtightness and thermal efficiency. The combination of Tinium 2+ windows (a wooden aluminium composite from Danish manufacturer STM) and four sets of Bifold doors from lacuna were ideal. Both products were selected for their short lead time (six weeks from order: please always check this, as this does vary), low maintenance and a highly-engineered finish. Many of our customers feel that these two products offer equivalent finishes to high-end products such as Internorm, but provide a much wider range of opening styles and options.

Both of these products are manufactured in Denmark and this was critical for the customer. The customer had previously purchased what they believed to be a German-made product but later found out that the product had been made in Poland and thus was not subject to the same government requirements in order to use the ‘Made in Denmark/Germany’ badge.

Country of manufacture is often the simplest gauge of quality. Always check this carefully, as some marketing material can be misleading: often the country of manufacture isn’t even stated. This is despite the product having a Scandinavian-sounding name.

For this project, a combination of aluminium-clad composite windows and heat-treated timber bi-folds was chosen. Both were made in Denmark and both featured the Blue-Grey RAL 7031; elegantly complimenting the external brickwork.

In general, we recommend either contrasting the colour of your windows with the external finish of the property, or picking out the colour to match a certain set of bricks or roof tiles. If you’re unsure, just ask us!

Having curved or arched heads in window openings presents a choice: should there be a separate section of curved alu-timber to fill the space? Or should the main part of the window itself be curved? We tend to recommend the former. The overall results are very similar, and choosing the separate arch is significantly cheaper and easier to manufacture. This is partly because a site template doesn’t need to be sent to an overseas production line, mostly because the glass unit does not need to be curved. These separated arches are precisely colour-matched with the same RAL colour-code and gloss level.

Colour-matching is often an important part of making the windows and doors of a project look cohesive and well-designed. For us, it’s essential that the arched heads, external cills and bay posts are finished in exactly the same colour as the windows themselves. Interestingly, the Lacuna bifolds are made from beech timber, without the aluminium external cladding (unlike the rest of the units). However, our expert Scandinavian factories have a perfect understanding of how colour and materials should work together. As a result, it is virtually impossible to spot any difference in colour.

We try to recommend the best options for all of our customers to make their everyday lives as easy as possible. A seemingly simple choice can create a world of difference. For this project, all doors have thumbturn locks on the inside, so that they can be locked and unlocked from the inside without the need for a key (of course, there are key-locks outside). This makes taking a quick step outside much simpler and helps to reduce a common frustration for customers.

‘Picture windows’ come in all shapes, sizes and designs. So, it was important to choose the correct overall look for the stairwell window. We greatly reduced the number of glazing bars compared to the original window, creating a much clearer view outside and removing any unnecessary fuss. However, choosing to include the cross-shape decorative bars made sense from a design perspective. The glass is now split into a similar ratio to the rest of the windows, and the horizontal bar aligns harmoniously with the red brickwork separating the two floors.