Glass specialists serving Brighton

Glass in Brighton's conservation areas

Brighton has more than thirty conservation areas and a very large number of listed buildings, concentrated in the Regency terraces of Kemptown, Brunswick and the Montpelier and Clifton Hill area. If your property is in one of them, the glass options narrow considerably and it is better to know that at the start.

Replacement double glazing in an original sash on a listed Regency frontage is normally a non-starter. Secondary glazing is the practical route: internal, reversible, invisible from the street, and considerably better than double glazing at cutting traffic and nightlife noise, which in central Brighton is usually the actual complaint. Our comparison guide sets out the numbers.

Basement flats, HMOs and access

Two Brighton-specific practicalities come up constantly. The first is access: a lot of the housing stock is converted terraces with narrow communal stairs and tight half-landings, and a full-height toughened panel does not bend around them. We check the route at survey and design around it rather than discovering the problem on fitting day.

The second is use class. A house converted to flats or run as an HMO is not treated as a single family dwelling under the Building Regulations, which raises the design load on any balustrade from 0.36 kN/m to 0.74 kN/m. That changes the glass and the fixings. If your property is let, tell us at survey, because a balustrade designed to the domestic figure in a building that needs the higher one will not pass.