403 Wilshire Blvd Santa Monica, CA 90401

The building

403 Wilshire Boulevard stands at the ocean end of Wilshire in Santa Monica, a few blocks back from the bluff and the pier.

The same boulevard, a different climate

This is Wilshire again, but with a maritime climate laid over it, and that changes the problem in two specific ways.

The first is the marine layer. Through late spring and early summer the mornings are grey and the cloud burns off around the middle of the day, so the building experiences a mild morning and then a sharp solar load from midday onwards. Fixed shading handles that badly, because it is designed for the sun's position and not for the sky's brightness, and occupants experience it as a room going from comfortable to unusable inside an hour.

The second is that the sun sets over water. West-facing glass a few blocks from the Pacific takes the low direct sun plus its reflection off the ocean, with no terrain in the way at all. In an office that produces glare no blind angle resolves, on the one elevation with the view worth paying for.

The constraints are local too. Salt air off the bay shortens the life of anything bolted to the outside of a building. Design control over street elevations in Santa Monica makes visible external changes slow to agree. And a multi-tenant building cannot give up a floor for a fortnight.

What window film does about it

Film is applied to the interior face of the existing glazing. It changes no exterior material, needs no scaffold and leaves the elevation as drawn, which is what makes it workable where the outside of the building is controlled and where salt would attack anything mounted on it.

Functionally it does two things at once, which is why it suits this site. It rejects most of the near-infrared energy, so the afternoon load after the marine layer clears is substantially reduced; and it lowers visible transmission enough that a low sun off the water is something people can work next to rather than something they turn their backs on. Effectively all of the ultraviolet goes as well, which slows fading of carpet, furniture and finishes on the west side.

There is a daylight argument as well as a heat one. The reason the blinds go down in a building like this is glare, not temperature, and once they are down the floor is lit artificially through the brightest part of the day — which puts the lighting load back into the same cooling system that was the problem in the first place. Film controls the brightness without removing the daylight, so the blinds go back up and the perimeter lighting can stay off.

One honest note on installation near the coast: humidity extends the cure. Film fitted in a damp week will look slightly hazy for longer before it clears completely, and that is the water drying out, not a defect.

We have completed commercial glazing projects in California and work on commercial glazing in both. See our commercial projects or request a quote.