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The Modern Architecture Takeover

If you live in any flourishing city in the US- whether it be Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, or even Austin, Texas you likely see and hear the surrounding landscape changing around you each and every day. As modern architecture sweeps the nation, we collectively notice the steady changes to our neighborhoods and experience our expectations evolve of what architecture means to us. As we marvel at new building projects big and small, we often wonder how modern architecture got to where it is today.

The tireless work and conceptualization of designers, engineers, and innovators have rebuilt the architectural industry from the inside out. We no longer build structures simply to fill a basic human need. We craft thought-provoking habitats that mimic the natural world, encourage a flexible lifestyle, and serve a luxurious experience for the dweller. We build structures to last and to impact. Particularly here in Los Angeles, the demand for the latest in modern architecture is high, and only gaining traction each and every day. Building that includes green design, cutting edge technology, and innovative techniques are celebrated and wholeheartedly invested in.

Keeping up with modernism is no easy endeavor. As a developer or the owner of a contracting company, how can you meet the demands of this flourishing industry? With the relative aesthetic of modern architecture changing so rapidly, and novel materials coming out every year, this industry forces you to think quickly, be on your toes and adopt flexibility that will keep you competitive and stay in business for years to come.

So What is Green Building?

In order to talk about modern architecture, we should probably define what it is to build “green”.

Green building is the practice of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building’s life-cycle from sitting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and deconstruction.

The Most Sought-After Architectural Elements

A constant question architects, designers and contractors are faced with, is how to read the room and discover what the next biggest design trend will be. Without a doubt, one of the most important facets of building today is the transition into green building while still maintaining a luxurious aesthetic. After years of challenges, collective distaste, and skepticism from the architectural industry and consumers, the green building movement is gaining traction, and more than that, it is becoming the new luxury. More than just solar panels and renewable energy, each aspect of a green building must be carefully designed and scrutinized in order to produce a positive ROI and feed into the eco intentions of the homeowner. So what are some elements of green building you can integrate into your designs?

Here is a shortlist of some of the basic principles of Green Building via the EPA:

  • Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
  • Water Efficiency.
  • Environmentally Preferable Building Materials and Specifications.
  • Waste Reduction.
  • Toxics Reduction.
  • Indoor Air Quality.
  • Smart Growth and Sustainable Development.

By building eco, you can craft a home or commercial building that considers the future, not just the present moment. Instantly elevate your business and appeal to high-end clientele by asserting your business one that works with the environment.

What Elevates a Home to Modern Luxury?

Rocket Homes defines modern luxury as:

“A luxury home is one that is valued within the top 10% of properties on the local market. Luxury homes tend to be considerable in size, located in optimal areas, constructed and finished with high-end materials and designed with uncommon architectural details and exceptional amenities.”

Juxtaposing natural elements and green building techniques with modern luxury will offer an architectural experience that will enthrall buyers and homeowners across the map. Creating a design moment that integrates natural luxury is more than just a Pinterest-worthy photo op- it’s the new normal. Plant-filled courtyards, water features, exposed wood design details, and stone countertops all help to bring the outside in and craft a harmonious balance of indoor/outdoor living. We all want luxury in our lives in some form or another. When you can elevate buildings with built-in considerations like heated flooring and the finest materials available, you set your designs apart from the rest and will attract serious buyers and high-end clientele.

Integrating modern design elements like expansive floor-to-ceiling Sliding Glass Room Dividers, glass wall partitions, and sliding barn doors, you instantly elevate the interior space by offering tons of natural light and flexibility that your clients will go crazy over.

By providing the design considerations of the modern-day and melding them with consideration for the natural world, you step into the realm of breathtaking modern architecture. Assert your business as forward-thinking, eco-conscious, highly modern, and watch your company thrive! For more inspiration and spatial solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best space-optimizing Sliding Glass Doors, sliding closet doors, and sliding room dividers offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

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Coastal Living in Marina Del Rey

Living in California is essentially a luxury unto itself. Living in Southern California, even better. Living in Marina Del Rey? An absolute dream. Great weather all year round, palm trees, a stunning harbor, fine dining, and shops scattered throughout a breezy coastal landscape. It comes as no surprise that real estate in Marina Del Rey is some of the most sought after in the world today. Getting the chance to build your own dream home in Marina Del Rey is an exciting, inspirational adventure. You should be intentionally designing your home to utilize all the best assets this area has to offer, including the sweet ocean breeze, stunning coastal views, plenty of sun exposure, and your proximity to the Pacific. Here are a few design considerations to keep close in mind while contracting your new home in Marina Del Rey.

Would You Look At That?

When you set out to design your dream Marina Del Rey home, take into account your innate access to a plethora of stunning views. Whether they be of the sparkling Pacific Ocean, the famous yacht harbor, or of the striking Los Angeles skyline, the views are essentially limitless. Once you define where you wish to direct your gaze for the foreseeable future, you can then start to think about how you can situate your home to emphasize that view. Making use of large-scale sliding glass doors that will forward you that beautiful view is a wonderful way to bring the outside in, so to speak. Additionally, think about other space optimizing solutions that will enhance and enable your visibility throughout the home and transmit the most natural light throughout your interiors. Let the ocean breeze sweep you up with floor to ceiling glass wall partitions and sliding glass room dividers for enhanced visibility of breathtaking views within your bedrooms, work-study, or family room. Do you use glass wall partitions and sliding room dividers or a breeze to install, will last a lifetime, and offer you the physical barrier of a wall without sacrificing your view maintaining a consistent aesthetic throughout your house is super important during the design process. If you decide to integrate glass wall dividers throughout your home, consider also installing sliding glass closet doors and sliding glass bathroom doors to match. To achieve a sleek modern interior theme, glass wall partitions will do the majority of the work for you!

Seaside Home Office

Regardless of how valuable having a home office is during this troubling pandemic, it’s always wise to design your home to include a full-size work-study. A place to collect your thoughts, work on personal projects, or to work from home while the necessity to work remotely continues for months on end. When designing your dream home office, think about how you can maximize your view to feel integrated to the outside while working away during the best daytime hours. Install glass office partitions rather than typical walls in order to enhance your view and visibility of the beautiful Marina Del Rey landscape.

Take Advantage of those Rays

Living in light-filled Southern California obviously offers many environmental benefits. One of the best perks about living in Marina Del Rey is your ability to install solar panels to power your home and situate yourself in the wonderful position to receive a generous ROI in the near future. Being able to sell your power back to PG&E is a huge financial relief and a large point of pride for many homeowners that switch to solar. Speak with your architect about your solar options, and inquire about other forms of renewable energy such as wind power. Being that you live in a breezy seaside town, you can effectively install rooftop windmills to generate even more electricity than solar alone. These technologies will undoubtedly save you money and earn you a few eco karma points in the process.

For more inspiration and space optimizing solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best sliding glass barn doors, sliding closet doors, sliding room dividers, and spatial solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

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Crafting the Perfect Workspace from Home

With a rapidly evolving definition of what it is to be a modern-day worker, so evolves our working environment. Whether you work from a computer, make art for a living, work as a physical therapist or bodyworker, teacher/tutor, travel agent, or even a hairstylist- all of these professions are ones that you can likely do from home.

Understandably, it is far more environmentally friendly working from home rather than going to an office day in and day out. Slash your daily CO2 emissions by saving yourself (and the planet) your taxing commute- nothing is worse than sitting in traffic while your car pumps out exhaust and adds to our growing carbon footprint. Other benefits, such as making use of your own kitchen rather than eating out every lunch, and (assuming every room in your home has a window), utilizing natural light rather than burning bulbs in a windowless office. Many are making the move towards working from home because if you can maintain productivity, it just makes a lot more sense. If you don’t necessarily need to be in the office five days a week, why not get creative and make your morning commute a thirty-second shuffle into the next room?

With a little planning and some tips from the space optimizing experts, you’ll be on your way to making a productive studio or home office in no time. Considering time, effort and budget as important factors in this transformation, we have outlined some helpful ideas to get you started.

Pick A Room

  • First things first- picking the right room of said home office or studio space. Important factors to consider are natural lighting, feasibility, size, storage capability, coziness, and foot-traffic flow surrounding the space. You certainly don’t want to select an unused room in your house that is dark and miserable to be in unless you feel you can effectively brighten it up with the right lighting. Which is, of course, a viable option. Generally though, air on the side of the brighter, the better when selecting your office room. Consider the fact that you’ll be indoors for the majority of prime daylight hours. This means you’ll quickly feel trapped inside and maybe even start to feel tired and lethargic if your chosen room is too dark and bearing little visibility to the outside world.
  • In terms of feasibility, were talking, “is this room already full of junk and storage spillover?” If the answer is yes, don’t pick that room unless you can find viable storage options for all of your existing material goods. This office has to work with you, not you work around it.
  • How large or small is the room? If you think you can squeeze all of your necessary staples- computers, a desk, filing cabinet, art supplies, exercise equipment, what have you- in it, then great. If you’re experiencing a bit of trepidation, perhaps consider a different room or swapping rooms with one that has more square footage to accommodate all of your needs.
  • How much distracting foot-traffic does your chosen room experience on a daily basis? If you have children, you should consider if it is within audible distance to their normal playtime spots, shouts or screams. Maybe you have roommates and they move around the house frequently, creating loud noises and therefore disturbing your workflow and potential clients that come to visit. All of these are very important considerations when first setting out to select the perfect room.

Craft A New Room

If there is no extra room available, luckily there are a few relatively simple solutions for you to employ. Find a relatively open space in your house that gets little use, and hopefully, comes with good lighting. Once you’ve found it, envision installing beautiful frosted glass wall partitions, or even sliding glass room dividers to craft entirely novel rooms out of nothing! With minimal installation, you save the cost, permanence, and inconvenience of serious construction. This solution offers you the flexibility to take down or rearrange your partitions and room dividers at any time. Our interior frosted glass doors and frosted wall dividers are the perfect medium of function and privacy all while allowing ample light to pass through. With a multitude of glass opacities, frame finishes, and available accessories, we provide all the customization options you could possibly need to make this space a working sanctuary.

Make It A Sanctuary

Remember: this workspace is about to be your little slice of solitude for the foreseeable future. Better make it as cozy, comfortable, and as conducive to productivity as possible. Again, we encourage you to embrace all the natural light and outside vistas available. This will help bring the outside in and make you feel that you’re not trapped indoors all day. After the sun goes down, you’ll need lighting- plenty of it. Make sure you’re well equipped to see into the late afternoon/ early evening hours- especially in the winter months. Floor lamps and spotlighting are a big help to make your space feel cozy and, in comparison to ceiling fluorescents which can make a space feel sterile. Try to integrate greenery and house-plants throughout your home office so as to breed fresh air, stimulate the senses, and craft somewhat of an alive sanctuary to create in. Make sure you get creative and wise about your storage. A great way to bring in more light while getting a handle on storage is to replace your existing closet doors with stylish sliding mirrored closet doors. This will effectively bounce back so much wonderful light throughout your office while creating the illusion that the room is larger than it actually is. An inexpensive win-win. Lastly, while dreaming up interior decorating schemes and design ideas for your new workplace, take it upon yourself to utilize your biggest and most helpful resource- the internet. Look to Pinterest, Etsy, or any online design mag to garner inspiration for your new interior space. This is a great way to craft vision boards and get novel ideas from existing designs.

With the above suggestions and helpful tips, we hope your transition to working from home is as enjoyable as possible. The Sliding Door Company has all the creative solutions you need moving forward with your exciting new project. Don’t hesitate to check out our website, which offers a myriad of design examples, photos, accessory options, and customizable choices. Get in touch with one of our knowledgeable representatives by scheduling a free consultation and start the transformation today!

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Glass Room Dividers create spaces that matter!

Sliding room dividers that stack to either side have been gaining in popularity over the past five years!

Select from elegant, easy to install sliding glass room dividers to more traditional or stacking glass doors to open up your whole floor plan. Have you ever visualized having one solution that could offer privacy when needed and open up with the touch of a finger to create a seamless transition from one area to another?

Well, we have what it takes to make it happen!

Room Dividers can be obscure or fully transparent!

Open air room divider with frosted glass gives privacy & allows sharing of lighting, heating & air conditioning, saving energy all year round. This suspended glass room divider curtails foot traffic when needed but the barrier disappears when you slide it open. Sliding room dividers can hide inside of a pocket, optimizing the entire floor plan!

Combo glass sliding doors give a little more visual privacy when needed. They stack to either side enlarging the room on demand. For bedrooms that also function as a home office, interior sliding glass room dividers create separation and privacy without disrupting the room’s functionality.

Glass Room Dividers

Glass Room Dividers are an Open and Shut Case!
There are good reasons to go for a sliding room divider:

  1. They are custom made to fit your specifications.
  2. They can be installed easily, quickly and with no waste.
  3. Wall slide barn doors save space! They hug the wall and take up virtually no floor real estate.
  4. They can transform a larger room into smaller sections in seconds.
  5. Room dividers provide visual aesthetics which is a huge advantage.
  6. Sliding glass room dividers can be locked for privacy when needed.
  7. Affordable elegance.

Learn more at: slidingdoorco.com
For commercial projects: spaceplus.com