Polycarbonates are a material that is relatively familiar to anyone who has ever been inside a green house. this super strong light weight material has been used in green houses for years but has become popular recently with architects as a substrate. The growing popularity of the material has resulted in a variety of companies offering designer version of the material in different patterns and colors.

I had expressed a great deal of interest in the material to our architect (Michael Huber) during our initial meetings and he delivered some opportunities where we could use it in our house. Although there is certainly a design detail to the product there is also a really great benefit as well. Because the materials comes in varying degrees of opacity it can be used as a room divider while still allowing natural light from other areas of the house to enter the room. Since both the boys bathroom and bedrooms in our house were located on the north side of the house and the majority of our windows gather sunlight on the south side there seemed to be an opportunity to use some of the polycarbonate to bring daylight into those rooms, diminishing our need to turn on extra lights during the day. Michael’s plan called for creating two openings in the stairwell one in a bedroom and one in the bathroom along with sheeting one entire wall with polycarbonate. This allowed light that naturally filled some of the larger southern facing spaces to spill over into the northern facing portions of the house.

We found dozens of reps from various manufacturers of the material, but our biggest challenge proved to be finding a vendor who stocked the item or had a sheet of it available on site. Because most of the distributors didn’t stock it that meant they would require a crating fee that would easily exceed the cost of the material. Finally Stacy tracked down a sheet of Ploygal available in St. Paul at Cope Plastics where they were able to cut it down to size for use. Then using some readily available pieces of aluminum channel we found at the local home improvement store we installed the first piece in the wall that divides the entry to the boys room. To the boys delight not only did the polycarbonate allow the light to enter the room but at night the LED night lights we purchased for their rooms, provided a beautiful light show as the light transmitted through the wall and into the living room outside of their bedrooms. It’s just one of the small details in our house that has made our house a truly unique and cool place to live.

The polycarbonate that works as a wall divider between our boys room. has been both a functional piece as well as a aesthetic portion of our homes design.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under Architecture, Design, Main, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.