A $200,000 Door! | Mansions ,Windows, and Doors | Winter Park, FL

A $200,000 door, 30 feet high, 30 feet wide, motorized, runs by the touch of an app on your smartphone. Let's dig into the amazing world of windows and doors when building a custom home. Whether it's the actual window or the view through the window, this facet of a custom home has one of the most massive impacts on the look and feel you're trying to achieve. We're here with Ryan Cunningham today from Mansion Windows and Doors to give you a glimpse into some of the options and features you have available when building a custom home. Welcome, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. There's a couple of things that we really wanna get to today, and that's the efficiency and safety of windows and doors today, really the aesthetics that windows and doors bring to your house and how those affect your actual choices, and some of the new technologies out there. So let's dive right into some of the efficiency and safety that windows and doors bring. Florida's a unique state with the hurricanes and everything like that. So how does that play into the windows and doors that you sell today? Yeah, so most windows and doors that are made today have to meet a certain, they call it a DP rating, or some people call it a PG rating, and it's really just a level of the wind velocity that that window can take. Here in Orlando, we really only need to be around a PG35, or a DP35, I'm sorry, and that means it can take a wind velocity up to like 143 miles an hour, which sounds like a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean a big stick flying 143 miles an hour can hit it and it won't break. It just means the wind itself, it can withstand 143 miles an hour. From there, it just goes up. You can go all the way up to a DP50, which is then considered an impact window, which means the glass is now laminated and it can now withstand impact. Like a car window. Correct. And when you see it break, it breaks into little pieces and it's safer. Right, so that's more of a tempered glass. So you can also do that in a window, which we have to do, almost every house has tempered windows, somewhere due to code, whether it's too far to the floor, it's close to the floor, or a door, all doors are tempered glass, which just it's safer if it shatters. But an impact window, it can withstand a hammer, it can withstand a baseball bat, it can withstand rocks. I've tried to break one and it's almost impossible. So anything a hurricane can throw at it, by Florida code, it has to basically handle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's great. Now, again, they aren't bulletproof, but yeah, a lot of times though, if we're in a storm that's bad enough to blow all your windows out, your roof's probably gone already. So here in Orlando, I don't see it as something that is necessary, unless you wanna use it for safety, like you were just mentioning a lot. Yeah, absolutely. The other major area with energy efficiency and safety is your UVA and your infrared that comes in that fades things, gets things hot, your house obviously affects your AC. So we'll talk a little bit about that and how the windows are designed today to combat that. Sure. So we all know the windows we grew up with as kids or the ones you moved into your first apartment is all single glazed, one little piece of glass, one little pane. There was no coating on the glass, so the sun could just come right in. I remember walking in front of windows and just feeling the heat. Or if you had like a couch in front of it, like a bank of windows and the top of the couch is always hot and faded. And faded. Yeah, so now most windows, actually all windows now offer low E, low E glass. So low E is a film that goes on the glass. Stops the transmission of heat. Correct. Okay. So it does, and now that the windows are now double pane, insulated glass, you have two pieces of glass that are insulated, which helps keep the heat out. And then you have that UV and like you said, the infrared. So it blocks the UV and that heat transfer. Okay, so it keeps the heat out for AC purposes and it keeps the UV rays out, which actually fade everything that they touch. Correct. Well, that's great. And those are standard now. Oh, so no one has to worry about not getting a window that doesn't have UV or infrared protection. You can get them without it, but it takes extra work. You'd have to ask for it, because it automatically comes on it, unless you do it, yeah. All right, let's talk about some of the new innovations. Where are windows going in today's world, in the world of custom homes? Right, so bigger and bigger and bigger. That's kind of the trend right now is glass. More glass, the better. The less frame, the less profile, the better. So every window brand is constantly trying to see how big they can go. Some brands don't ever get there, because you have to spend the money to get the testing, especially here in Florida, to get things Florida product approved. But there are a lot of innovative companies that we deal with that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Florida product approval is something that Florida has put into place to protect the consumer here in Florida, because it sets standards based on hurricane wind codes, so you're protected in your house no matter where you live. And each company that actually builds windows to be sold in Florida has to achieve these Florida product approval codes and standards. So along with that, we have motorized just the different ways doors open. We're seeing a door within a door, accordion style doors, and then motorizing any of those so that you can open them with a touch of a button, right? And they can do them no matter how big they are? Yeah, I've got a job right now that we're working on that has some very, very large doors, and that are gonna be motorized. We'll talk about that in just a second. All right, last but not least, aesthetics. We can talk about what the windows do, and that's great and all, but most clients want to know, are these gonna look good in my house? And as you and I have talked about before, there's three main things that windows are made out of. I mean, other than the glass, the frame around the window's either wood, vinyl, or metal. And you were saying in a conversation we were having before how a lot of times aesthetics actually determines what you're gonna use for the cladding on that window. Yeah, for us here at Mansion, we're a little different because we don't have a flagship of one or two window brands. We carry 12 to 15 different products. So the best way to go about it is you see what your architect has drawn, and we find what aesthetic is there, and we try to match it to whatever we offer, what the best fit would be. But yes, certain window brands are gonna give you a slimmer frame profile, a slimmer sash profile, more glass, where others, more traditional vinyl windows or composite windows are gonna have a chunky, bulkier aesthetic to the window. Sometimes that works on a real traditional like colonial style house, but everything that's trending towards today is just glass, glass, glass. So we'll actually see in this video some Euro door windows that we're installing in a house at 750 Gatlin that have that really thin aluminum style with a large glass frame in the center of it. The interesting thing about that door that you'll see later is the interlocks on that sliding glass door are only an inch wide. So typical interlocks between the panels of your sliders are around three to five inches, where this is only an inch. So it gives you the effect of a wall of glass that's fixed, but it actually... So when you have that huge lake out behind your house, all these styles, wide styles, don't get in the way of your view. Correct. You can imagine you could have a 28 foot opening per se, let's 25, 28 foot opening with only two vertical lines that are inch wide. I mean, you can't find that really. That's right. All right, we teased about it at the beginning of the show, but we talked about a 30 foot wide by 30 foot high glass door that's motorized. Tell us a little bit about that door and how much it costs. Okay, so this isn't for the faint of heart, but it's the manufacturer's Panorama. They're a manufacturer out of Portugal and they can do some really neat things. Like their windows are frameless windows. So they're kind of embedded in the wall. So all you see is glass. It's a really cool product, but they do have a sliding glass door that we're going to be doing, two of them actually, that are 30 feet wide, 29 feet tall. And they're motorized obviously, because Ms. Smith's not going to go and try to open a 30 foot tall door. So yeah, it's like you said, you can, there's an app, there's a click of the button. You can have different types of automation to open it, but yeah, 30 feet tall. And $200,000. Yeah, factoring in install, it's going to be around 200 grand per door. Wow, per door. Well, we want to thank you very much for your time today, for letting us come into the showroom and see everything. And our viewers will actually get to see your product being installed at a house a little bit later in the video. Thank you again for your time and we look forward to many future projects. We're here at Gatlin to see the Euro wall system that we just talked about in the showroom. We're installing a nine foot high by 16 foot wide Euro door in this opening that'll allow unprecedented views of the lake. Let's go take a look at some that have already been installed and I'll show you what makes these doors unique. These are Euro doors that have just been installed and it really gives a good example of what makes them unique. The frame around a Euro door is about three inches wide on three sides, the top, the bottom and the side that closes. But when they're fully closed and locked, the center frame is only an inch wide. So it creates a look when you step back that looks like a full window because you don't have the three inch wide frame that separates the two sliding doors. Even on their 14 foot high by 30 foot wide doors, this is the same. It creates a really unique look for a client that lives on a lake or with a view behind them that they wanna see. A big thank you to Mansion Windows and Doors for having us in their showroom today and then being able to see the product installed. Stay tuned as we enter the final phase of this phenomenal remodel. I'm Daniel Kennerly with Allure Homes.