Wider Glass and Contemporary Double Doors Open Up High-Desert Views

Around Montrose, the high desert opens into sagebrush, dry-stacked rock walls and long mesas on the horizon. This home sits right in that landscape, with a covered stucco porch at the entry and a tan brick wall of windows along the front. For all the scenery outside, though, the openings facing it were broken into small pieces: tall, slim windows separated by brick columns, and a single front door squeezed between thin sidelights and a transom. 

The homeowners had two goals. They wanted the house to hold its temperature better, and they wanted less frame and more glass between them and the view. Their answer was fiberglass picture windows across the front and a set of contemporary double doors at the entry.

The original front windows came as a row of tall units, each split horizontally into a large upper pane and a short lower section. Between every pair sat a column of brick, so looking out meant looking through a series of narrow slots. Each frame, rail and pier interrupted the view a little more. 

The new picture windows turn that wall into wide expanses of glass joined by slim frames. With nothing that slides, cranks or swings, a picture window needs no sash or hardware, so the frame can stay lean and the glass can take up nearly the whole opening. Here, that means the trees and lawn in front of the house now read as one continuous scene instead of a sequence of strips. 

The frames are fiberglass, a sensible match for western Colorado, where bright sun and big swings between day and night temperatures put steady stress on window materials. Fiberglass holds its shape through those swings, so the glass stays tightly sealed into its frame, which supports the efficiency the homeowners asked for.

Neither opening was a simple swap. On the brick side, the old windows were set into masonry with brick piers standing between them, and the new layout had to be fitted into that structure while leaving a clean, finished edge where glass meets brick. At the entry, thick stucco bands framed the old door, sidelights and transom as separate pockets, and the stucco surround had to work with a single, larger door unit. 

Mulled openings like these, where several units are joined within masonry or stucco, take careful planning. Every joint between window and wall is a spot where air or water could find a way in, so getting those transitions right mattered just as much to the finished look as it did to the home’s energy performance.

The old front door was a single painted door with a full glass panel, framed on either side by narrow sidelights and topped with a transom. Thick stucco divided each piece, so the entry felt busy for its size. 

Now a pair of contemporary doors fills the opening. Each door holds tall glass broken by a few slender horizontal bars, a pattern that gives the entry a modern, architectural feel without closing it off. The dark frames and matching lever handles stand out against the warm stucco, and with two doors instead of one, the entry is wider, brighter and better suited to the scale of the porch it opens onto.

This project started with a wish for better efficiency and narrower sightlines, and it ended with a front of the house that works with its setting instead of cropping it. Wide fiberglass picture windows now take in the yard and trees in a single view, and the contemporary double doors at the entry give the porch a more generous, modern entrance than the one they replaced.