Boston

Building in Boston means working with two very different cities at once. One is nineteenth-century brick and brownstone: bowfront rowhouses in the South End, Federal houses on Beacon Hill, Back Bay townhouses, and wood triple-deckers across Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and East Boston. The other is glass and metal: office towers downtown, mixed-use blocks in the Seaport, and labs and residential buildings going up wherever there is a lot to build on. Both face long cold winters, nor'easters and wind off the harbor. Both are held to some of the more demanding energy expectations in the country. Windows and doors here have to fit old openings, pass review, and perform through a hard winter.

Vitraz fabricates European aluminum systems on Aluprof profiles in our own Brooklyn shop. Boston projects are built there and delivered, labelled by opening. We do not have a Boston office or crew. Your contractor or glazier installs, and we can refer installers who know these systems. More on how we work across the state is on our Massachusetts service area page.

Boston weather is hard on a building envelope. Cold snaps push heat out through frames and glass. Nor'easters drive rain sideways into joints. Waterfront buildings in the Seaport, Charlestown and East Boston take wind and salt air that inland buildings do not.

Every system we fabricate is thermally broken, with a polyamide break between the inside and outside profiles, so the interior frame stays warmer and condensation is less of a problem. Insulated glazing is standard, and triple glazing, Low-E coatings, argon fill and warm-edge spacers are specified per opening. Exterior units carry multi-point locking, which also pulls the sash tight against its gaskets along the full height.

For exposed elevations and larger openings, the MB-86N system is built for heavier glazing and demanding wind and weather. Aluminum does not rust the way old steel windows do, and powder-coated or anodised finishes hold up well near the water.

On energy, Massachusetts has a stretch energy code that communities can adopt, and Boston has its own building emissions ordinance (BERDO) for larger buildings. We do not interpret code for your project, but every quote states the glazing build-up and thermal performance, and each system comes with the manufacturer documentation your engineer and energy consultant need.

Our residential work in Boston is mostly high-end renovation and custom building. Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the South End sit in historic districts with their own architectural review. After well over a century of settling, their openings are rarely square. We build every frame to the measured opening, to the millimetre, so reveals stay even and sightlines line up across a bowfront or a row of tall parlor windows. Out-of-square openings are standard work for us, not an upcharge.

Where a building had steel windows, our steel-look windows keep the original proportions and bar patterns, matched from a survey or a straight-on photo. For landmark work we provide details for both the installer and the reviewer. Vitraz engineered and fabricated the window systems for the Flatiron Building in New York, so we know what a landmark glazing job asks for.

Inside, aluminum entry and pivot doors, glazed interior doors and lift-and-slide openings can all come off the same shop floor in the same finish as the windows. Frames can be one color outside and another inside, for example black on the street and warm grey in the room.

Send us your drawings, elevations or window schedule and we will come back with a line-by-line quote and performance figures. You can also call (917) 418-0816, Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm, or request a quote online.