Highly Exposed Staffordshire Moorlands Country Cottage

A stunning home setting a great example of a few areas: a unique NCS colour, a Unik aluminium-clad timber product, and the luckily not-unique ability of our installation staff to provide perfect survey notes so that both UK and Danish offices can provide exactly what’s needed to make a replacement job look perfect.

This project features a mixture of different building materials surrounding the windows, some interesting angles to work with, and the skilful application of our black weathertight tape. Let’s start with that tape, because there are some very clear examples of how it looks at works on display here.

A high performance window is worthless if the installation isn’t of an equally high standard; the most common and most detrimental mistake is to use the same silicone-based sealant you’d see around a UPVC window. This sort of sealant is going to quickly turn brittle and begin cracking due to natural building movement: this would ruin the weathertightness and airtightness if a Class 4 airtight window were in the middle. On the other hand, our expanding foam tape is designed to insulate both acoustically and thermally, with a life expectancy of over 25 years, happily expanding and contracting with the building all the way. As an added bonus, the black outline does look especially good against natural oak…

This combination of high performance windows alongside a high performance installation has transformed this home. The previously windows were not that old, yet still struggled to seal correctly. Interestingly for us, our offerings were immediately tested by Storm Darragh, and the customer tells us they passed with flying colours.

Next, window-doors are a interesting area! These are very well named: simply, they look and work as you’d expect a window to, but happen to be the same size as a door. As you can imagine, there’re a good few engineering steps to get there sensibly, and the compromise is normally that it’s impossible to have handles or locks on the outside – the frames are simply too small. We say “normally” because, in the world of Unik Funkis, there is a unique solution that means a usable handle can in fact be fitted to the outside.

You may also spot that the traditional glazing bar is only present on front-facing windows – retaining the image of the property. The rest being clear glass provides a better view out, makes them easier to clean, gives a better U value and makes the overall cost a good step cheaper.

Hopefully though, you won’t have spotted that the angled unit upstairs is three completely separate frames joined together. Glass being security-sealed from factory is super helpful generally, but it does mean units of that size can quickly get over 200kg without any way of reducing the weight for installing… To save the customer the cost and logistics of a crane in the back garden, fixing and sealing the units together one by one is an excellent workaround.