Boyenga Team · Burlingame Eichlers What's mine worth?

Burlingame Eichlers  /  The glass

The wall that is not a wall

Three things make the glass read right. Most upgrades lose one.

Sightline, division and threshold. Get all three and a replaced window is invisible. Lose one and the house reads subtly wrong from the street without anyone being able to say why. Buyers who know this architecture can say why, and it shows up in the price.

The honest tension

Single-glazed floor-to-ceiling glass is the reason to own one and the thing owners complain about. Anyone who tells you there is a solution with no trade-off is selling windows.

A brown board-and-batten Eichler in Burlingame, with a shed roof rising to the left, a glazed clerestory under the beams, a recessed glazed entry and a two-car garage.
Shed and clerestory, warmer. The same shed-and-clerestory idea in a warmer register, with the glazing at the entry pulled down to the ground so the front door sits in light. The roof lifts left rather than right — these plans were handed to suit the lot, which on a hillside subdivision matters more than it would on a flat one.
A white-painted brick Eichler in Burlingame with the roof fascia and projecting beam ends painted turquoise, two mahogany garage doors, a red front door with a decorative screen, and a palm tree on the lawn.
The fascia, painted. Every other house on this page keeps the roof edge quiet. This one paints it turquoise — fascia, beam ends and all — and the effect is to draw the horizontal line rather than let it disappear. Add white painted brick, mahogany doors and a red screen door, and you have the period colour argument in one elevation. Whether you love it is not the point; it shows how much the fascia carries.

What to specify

The three that matter, in order.

Sightline
The visible width of frame around the glass. Insulated units are thicker than single panes, so the frame carrying them is usually deeper and wider — and in an Eichler you are reading that frame directly against the beam above it and the slab below. Ask for the narrowest sightline the manufacturer makes, and ask to see it installed rather than in a brochure. This is the single most common way a good window makes a house look worse.
Division
Where the mullions fall. The original divisions were set against the structural bay — the glass lines up with the posts. A replacement that introduces a new horizontal, or shifts a vertical to suit a standard unit size, breaks the relationship between the glazing and the frame of the house. Keep the divisions where they were, even when it costs more.
Threshold
At the sliders, the interior floor should run out flush to the terrace. That continuity is the whole architectural argument of the house. Anything that introduces a step — a new sill, a thicker floor, a radiant overlay — ends it. The overlay trap →

What a bad job looks like

You can diagnose most of it from the kerb.

Fat white frames. Vinyl in a residential profile, sized for a conventional punched window, dropped into an opening designed for a steel-slim or narrow-aluminium frame. The proportion of glass to frame inverts and the wall stops reading as glass.

A new horizontal that was not there. Often a transom bar introduced because the supplier's maximum pane size was smaller than the opening. It cuts the vertical run and the ceiling stops feeling continuous with the outside.

Filled-in glass. Somebody solved the heat-loss problem by replacing part of a glass wall with a solid panel. This is the one that costs real money at resale, because it is expensive to reverse and it removes the thing a buyer came for.

A step at the slider. See above. Nearly always a symptom of something done to the floor rather than to the window.

The full kerbside checklist →

Before you replace anything

The cheapest comfort gains are not in the glass.

An Eichler's biggest thermal hole is usually the roof, not the windows, because the original roof insulation was under an inch of fibreglass crushed flat under gravel. Eichler Network's reported figure for insulating to R-19 is a 25–40% reduction in heating. No window package does that.

After the roof: air sealing at the perimeter, at penetrations and around the frames you already have. Draughts are felt as cold long before glazing U-values are.

None of which means do not replace the glass. It means sequence it second, after the roof, so you are not paying for windows to compensate for a roof that is still uninsulated. If the roof is near the end of its life anyway, the two jobs belong in the same conversation.

Roofs and insulation →  ·  Energy in an all-glass house →

One safety note

Original glass at floor level is worth a conversation.

These houses predate modern safety-glazing requirements. A large annealed pane running to the floor is precisely the condition current code treats as hazardous, and any replacement in that position will be tempered or laminated as standard.

We are not telling you to rip out original glass. We are telling you to know which panes are original and which are not, and to weigh that if there are small children in the house. Your inspector can identify tempered glass from the etched stamp in a corner; no stamp usually means it is not.

Talk to us

Getting window quotes?

Send us the product and the elevation. We will tell you what the sightline will look like on an Eichler, because a profile that is fine on a 1990s house can be wrong on this one.