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Can I get the opinion of Architects, Shop Front Designers or Joiners on our new Shop Front?
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09-05-2022 7:34pm#1
Joinery is all done and we have no issues with the quality of the Joinery but we are not happy with certain details of the design which were there in the original simplistic drawings but not obvious to the eye so I didn't catch them. Some of our issues are too late and expensive to change now but we can live with them but one issue of which we feel can be made more acceptable to us with a viable alteration that won't cost a fortune to change.
Facade hasn't been painted yet but we photoshopped something close to the eventual colour ourselves because the arch/designer said not to judge till it was painted.
Can you guess which part of this our main issue is with...and are we simply philistines that don't understand traditional Victorian style joinery rules which the arch/designer says this design follows?
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Basically the original Arch/Designer who designed the original facade for a renovation back in '97 was thrilled to get the commission to re-visit their work to correct the amendments/'mistakes' the contractor back in '97 supposedly made without the designers permission. By the looks of things its those amendments the contractor made back then that are the design elements we actually liked and felt were normal, and its the designers 'Corrections' with this new design that we dislike and can't believe are following traditional Victorian facade joinery rules which is what the designer claims.
To our mind, the Plinths at the bottom of each pillar should be level with each other, with the leftmost being the shortest as its on the upslope and each plinth to the right getting taller to reach the ground on the downslopes. The inset detail on the pillars should all be level with each other too as you pointed out. The left side Stall-riser (under window detail) Inset should be a bit taller and the right side one should be shorter so they match in size.
I can just about grasp why they may have done it this way in that they treated each window and surrounding pillars and details as a separate entity which are consistent within themselves but not with each other on the other side of the door. However thats all too expensive to change now given the cost will be borne by us as we didn't catch this at the drawings stage. Basically we just glanced at them because to our untrained eye they looked pretty much the same as the '97 facade and we assumed the designer was pretty much re-creating the original facade, just with a few tweaks that had nagged at them for years.
The thing that bugs us the most and might be a cheaper and easier fix is those Skirting/kick boards. They follow the slope of the path and because they're are so close to other horizontal details them not being parallel is an absolute eye catcher and not in a good way.
We photoshopped some options without the Kickers/with shorter kickers hoping putting a few more inches between the non parallel lines would fool the eye but none of the options looked right. The only option that looked in any way right that we came up with was the following photo. Level kickboard parallel with other horizontals, that is cut to the slope on the bottom of the board, that starts half way down the plinths on the left and butts the top of the plinths on the right. This also happens to be the way the Black step also runs.
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Heres the old shop front pulled from Google Streetview. Its actually weird that the Weather hasn't been atrocious these last 3 years but most of the deterioration and rot came to a head in the 3 or so years since this Streetview was taken. Though I suppose thats the way it goes. Fine and weather proof for donkeys years and then some cracks or gaps open up that you don't notice and water gets behind and starts rotting things from the inside not noticeable at a glance on the outside until pieces crumble off!! LOL. ie Plinth pieces started rotting and falling off, panel gaps started separating and warping and raising etc It had started before this photo but then the Pandemic, lockdowns and then pent up demand for trades hit and we couldn't organise getting it all redone till now.
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The image in the OP is wrong and not to traditional details. Or if they was a traditional method, there was as variation as tradition.
The stallrisers and plinths should be level with each other. The slope should be accommodated in the skirting so that the only non-parallel line is the ground. The projecting brackets are poorly proportioned imo.
This is similar shopfront with the details corrected. Looks far better imo.
FYI this is from a shopfront design guide
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Heres a Google Streetview from another shop in another part of the town that also has conventional skirting detail. Stallrisers aren't as tall as ours though.
One wonders if our designer compromised on normal practice wrt to matching plinth heights because of their desire for full stallriser joinery/detailing under the windows? I mean I do like the fact its no longer just rectangular panels of Plywood with some profiles nailed on around the edges and panels affixed to white render stallriser 'wall' with a painted black 'Skirt'.
I think they realised that if they tried to conform to level plinth heights, the Skirting/baseboard/kicker on the right window stallriser would be ridiculously tall and out of all proportion with its partner on the left window stallriser. So they stepped down the plinth heights left to right allowing a reasonable sized Skirt/baseboard/kicker on both sides but then ran into the design issue of how to transition from the plinths on the left to their down-slope stepped down plinth counterpart so to speak.
So like I said in earlier postings, when trying to work out their thought process I can kinda see where some of it may have come from. However, what I don't understand is why they came up with the particular Skirt/baseboard/kicker solution they ended up with that just looks intuitively wrong with the non parallel lines so close together. I don't understand how we the customer seem to have come up with a better more aesthetically pleasing solution to the Skirting 'problem' that does a better job of reconciling all the constraints imposed by the rest of the facade design and/or the slope the shop happens to be on....and we came up with it before we even noticed that the black step into the shop already does exactly the same thing!! ie. Transitions from half way down the left plinth to level with the top of the right plinth.
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One wonders if our designer compromised on normal practice wrt to matching plinth heights because of their desire for full stallriser joinery/detailing under the windows? I mean I do like the fact its no longer just rectangular panels of Plywood with some profiles nailed on around the edges
The new stallriser detail could have been used regardless of the heights. The height that detail is place at is independent of the detail.
I think they realised that if they tried to conform to level plinth heights, the Skirting/baseboard/kicker on the right window stallriser would be ridiculously tall and out of all proportion with its partner on the left window stallriser.
If they did it with a level plinth. The two stallrisers would be the same size. That's how you get them in proportion, make up levels in the plinth. The current stall risers are mismatched and out of proportion. Ans the make-up zone in the fascia is very obvious.
So they stepped down the plinth heights left to right allowing a reasonable sized Skirt/baseboard/kicker on both sides but then ran into the design issue of how to transition from the plinths on the left to their down-slope stepped down plinth counterpart so to speak.
And that is the problem imo. They designed it as a slopped skirting board not a plinth. It makes no sense architecturally to me. The plinth represents the floor level or base. From that all the stallrisers, pillasters etc are built and are match. Each shop typically has one floor level, so one plinth. The next shop down the street has a different floor level and so the plinth steps at the next shopfront.
Personally I'd have done it this way;
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Another Photoshop Master I see!! Stunning work Mellor. Thank You!
That Skirting on the right side is definitely getting to be on the excessively tall side but your image shows its just about tenable and allows all other details to be correctly proportioned. So my intuition that this may have informed their thought process was probably right. With the Photoshop we can see its just about tenable but her paper and CAD drawings obviously didn't convince them of same.
There was no way back to that degree anyway. Would have required ripping off and redoing a significant proportion of the work which would have been out of our pocket because like I said earlier, we failed to spot these issues at the planning stage, so thats on us.
Oh, to be able to go back in time, cut out the designer and show the Joiner that photo and say, "Make this for me!"
Ah well, lesson learned.
So we went ahead with the compromise solution and its just costing us some labour and new skirting as they were able to get the other one off without damaging the panel behind it. Bit of sanding of Glue marks and filling of nail holes before painting and it'll look perfect.
Very happy with the paint colour as well. Thats still the photoshop above. In the flesh is a lovely shade of green and a lovely gloss which surprised me. I haven't been paint shopping for a decade and for some reason I was under the impression that rich gloss paint was a thing of the past with the EU laws against POC's. ie. It was all eggshell semi-gloss these days. Have the Chemical engineers found a safe replacement for the POC's from the old Gloss paints and given us our lovely gloss finishes back?
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