Beretania Street Showroom - 188 S Beretania St Honolulu HI 96813

The building

The showroom at 188 South Beretania Street, on the edge of downtown Honolulu, is built the way vehicle showrooms are built: a steel frame carrying as much glass as it can hold, so that the floor inside is on display to the street.

To be clear about what we did here, because the building type invites the wrong assumption: this is flat architectural glass — the building's glazing. Ace Glass Tinting works on buildings, temples, homes and boats. We do not tint vehicles.

The most glazed commercial building there is

A showroom has a higher ratio of glass to wall than any other commercial building type, and everything inside it is on display to be judged on its finish. The display glazing faces the street and takes sun for most of the working day, with no depth of reveal and nothing shading it.

Stock parked a few inches behind that glass sits in a greenhouse. The air in a vehicle standing in direct sun behind glazing reaches temperatures well above the showroom around it, and dashboards, trim and upholstery are the parts that record it first. Under a UV index that stays above ten for most of the Hawaiian year, that is a daily exposure, not a seasonal one.

The building's own interior fades on the same schedule: flooring, signage, printed material, banners and the seating in the customer lounge.

And the sales desks sit on the glass line, because that is where the stock is. Staff spend a full shift in direct sun with nothing between them and it, while the cooling system deals with a load that arrives through the glazing rather than through anything it was sized against.

What window film does about it

The balance on a showroom is different from an office. The floor has to stay bright and the finishes on the stock have to show true color, so the film is chosen for infrared rejection at high visible transmission rather than for darkness: most of the heat out, effectively all of the ultraviolet out, and the light and color left alone. Glare comes down enough that the desks on the glass line are usable and the window stops mirroring the street back at passers-by.

The customer areas benefit as much as the display floor does. A waiting lounge with a glazed wall is where people sit for an hour with nothing to do but notice how warm they are, and the seating, the printed material and the signage in it are all being bleached on the same schedule as everything else near the glass.

What film does not do is worth saying plainly. It reduces solar gain through the building's glazing only — it changes nothing about a vehicle standing outside in the lot, and it will not by itself fix a showroom whose air distribution never reached the glass line in the first place.

If you run a showroom, a dealership or any building with a large display frontage, we will survey the glass and quote it. See our commercial work or request a quote.