Commercial Aluminium Doors & Glazed Entrances

Commercial aluminium doors are heavy-duty, thermally broken glazed doors built for the traffic, security and escape requirements of offices, shops and residential blocks, and BDF Architectural supplies and installs them across London and the UK for main contractors, developers and building owners. Commercial doors work harder than any other part of a façade: hundreds of openings a day, a security line at night, and often a fire or escape route as well.

The doors are built from robust, thermally broken aluminium with commercial-grade, high-security locking, in full or partial glazing and made to measure for each opening. We work across Schüco, Cortizo and Aluprof aluminium systems and Jansen steel, so the doors can match the curtain walling or shopfront around them. For main entrances, Schüco ADS 75 HD.HI is a heavy-duty, highly insulated commercial door for large-format leaves, high use and automation and security interfaces.

The right door type depends on the opening and the traffic. Single and double hinged doors are the standard for most entrances and escape doors, and are the simplest to combine with exit hardware, closers and access control. Pivot doors, where the leaf turns on a pivot set in from the edge, suit large feature entrances where the chosen system offers them. Sliding doors suit wide openings and lobbies where a swinging leaf would get in the way. For frontages that need to open fully onto the street, such as restaurants and bars, commercial bifold doors fold the whole opening back; we cover those on our Commercial Bifold Doors page.

On shopfronts, aluminium entrance doors usually sit within a framed glazed screen or curtain walling, so the doors and fixed glazing are drawn as one frontage in matching profiles and colour. Communal entrances to residential blocks need a door that closes and locks reliably behind every resident, works with the door entry and access control system, and meets any security standard in the specification. Office and lobby entrances add accessible use and a high standard of finish, and sometimes a draught lobby of two sets of doors to keep heat in.

Escape doors need exit hardware that suits the people using them. Panic exit devices to BS EN 1125, usually push bars, are used where members of the public may use the exit and may not know the building; emergency exit devices to BS EN 179, such as push pads or lever handles, are used where the occupants are staff who know the building. The fire strategy sets which doors are escape doors and which way they open, and the locks, closers and exit devices are chosen with the door so they work together.

Most commercial entrances now have access control, and many main entrances are automated. We prepare and coordinate the doors for both: electric locks or strikes, door contacts, cable routes through the frame and the reinforcement for an operator are agreed with the access control and automation installers at design stage, so the doors arrive ready for their equipment rather than being cut about on site.

Accessible entrances follow Approved Document M for new work, which covers the clear opening width, the force needed to open the door, level or low thresholds and vision panels. A level threshold on an external door has to be detailed with drainage so it stays weathertight, and where a manual closer cannot meet the opening force guidance a powered door is usually used. We design each door to its requirements and confirm them at technical review.

Security requirements come from the specification. Communal and residential entrances may be required to meet PAS 24 or Secured by Design, and commercial entrances may call for a burglar resistance class under EN 1627; where a standard is specified, the system and configuration are selected for test evidence that meets it. Thermally broken profiles and insulating glass help the doors meet the thermal targets set by the specification and Part L, which matters where doors and their screens make up much of a ground-floor façade. Where a door has to be fire rated it is specified against the fire strategy as a complete doorset, and Jansen Janisol 2 steel doors are tested to EI30.

Commercial doors are made to measure, so there are no stock sizes. The leaf size is set by the opening, by the clear width needed for access under Approved Document M and for escape under the fire strategy, and by the largest leaf the chosen system can make: on Aluprof MB-86N, hinged doors go up to 1,400 mm wide and 3,000 mm high, and pivot doors up to 2,000 mm wide and 3,400 mm high.

At Prescot Street in Whitechapel we installed a full aluminium commercial door suite with the curtain walling around it, and at Blackfriars in the City of London commercial doors and bifold doors across ground-floor units. Profiles are fabricated in our West Drayton facility, and doors can be supplied on their own or packaged with the curtain walling, screens and windows around them.

To price, send the door schedule with sizes and quantities, plans and elevations, the hardware, access control and automation requirements, any fire or escape doors in the fire strategy, any security standard specified, and programme dates.