Hotel/Resort

With destination properties competing for return guests, those with upscale features, memorable views, and expansive spaces have an advantage. For resort and hospitality properties, folding door systems can create large indoor/outdoor areas that enable users to enjoy the surroundings. With unobstructed views. Guest rooms, suites and villas, outdoor cabanas, and high-rise balconies can all be outfitted with folding doors.

At one of Las Vegas' hippest and most popular resorts, the Palms Place Hotel and Spa, a folding door system was used in the Simon Restaurant and Lounge. The concept was to connect the outdoor pool and spa area to the restaurant, with a clad folding door system chosen to reflect the elegant and open feel of the lounge and restaurant.

Showrooms

Glass is an ideal backdrop to showcase products, and has been incorporated in a number of showrooms as owners seek the flexibility and upscale visual aesthetic of glass door systems to reflect their corporate culture. The Lexus dealership located in Macon, Georgia, for example, wanted to encompass its mission statement—“relentless pursuit of perfection”—in the design of its showroom. The Lexus Covenant directs and guides the dealership to “treat each customer as we would a guest in our home.” David Gibson of Butler Lexus wanted his customers to feel at home from the minute they walked in the front doors to the second they drove off the lot. An all-aluminum folding door system helped achieve the goal. “The doors gave our vehicle delivery room a great feel of being in an atmosphere of a high-end home as opposed to a traditional dealership with roll up doors,” says Gibson. “The vehicle delivery home represents the end of a journey for our customers as they complete their luxury car buying experience. The end of the journey should leave a lasting impression. When the customer walks in, sees their new luxury automobile, and drives out through the opened doors, the world of driving and experiencing their new automobile opens up before them.”

Educational

Traditional classrooms were designed with desks facing a blackboard in front of the room, but that paradigm has changed. Today's schools value and require flexibility, and spaces must frequently be modified to accommodate changes in enrollment, curriculum, or teaching style. Transforming one large open room to multiple class rooms offers a flexible multi-purpose interior solution. Folding glass doors can make better use of interior spaces or can create large open spaces for not only for schools, but for libraries, and museums as well.

Interior Dividers

As interior dividers in commercial spaces, folding door systems have extensive applicability. Flush guide tracks allow for a smooth transition between rooms, offices, conference rooms and meeting rooms. In San Francisco, flexibility was key to the design of the Dutch Consulate public spaces, and the functional requirement for multiple uses within the public suite was a basic planning principle for the space. In looking at a movable wall solution for the main multi-purpose room, it was important that a high level of finish and refinement in detail be integral to the selected product, and that it continue the design vocabulary through its incorporation into the main conference meeting space. “The clean, minimal detailing of the door frame, glazing, and hardware, combined with the unobtrusive floor and ceiling tracks, reinforces the minimal, international design vocabulary, while providing the ability to quickly modify the space through concealing the door in a relatively small enclosure at one side of the room,” says Charles Uehrke, Project Director, Huntsman Architectural Group, who notes that the scenario has held up in practice. “The frequency of modifying the space use, through the opening and closing of the doors, required a high level of quality in fabrication and materials of the doors. The doors have proven themselves, over and over again, to hold up to the demands of the client's changing meeting needs and perform effortlessly in their ease of reconfiguration,” he adds.