Apeer tops its ‘good, better, best’ market offer with quad glazing casette-equipped doors. Glass Times looks at the Northern Irish doormaker’s ‘doors for everyone’ approach.
As window and door makers work themselves into a lather about the almost inevitable requirement for triple glazing to meet future Building Regulations requirements for the replacement market, Ballymena, Northern Ireland-based door producer Apeer has seemingly thumbed its nose at the rest by introducing quadruple glazing as standard in its recently launched top-end offer. Triple would simply not do the job in a ground-breaking 120mm front-to-back format, believed to be the deepest residential door format available for the home improvement sector.
These features are to be found in Apeer’s latest launch, The Residence Door Collection by Apeer, which sees the veteran doormaker partner with Heritage window market maker and leader The Heritage Collection to produce a residential door range worthy of its timber replacement windows. The twenty-style range not only satisfies the exacting standards defined by The Residence Collection, it has also allowed Apeer managing director Asa McGillian’s longstanding ambition to manufacture a door for the popular market that would meet and even beat, the standards laid down by the Passive House Institute. For the record, solid versions of the new range have been tested to provide market-thrashing 0.51 W/m2K, with Passive House Institute requiring 0.89 W/m2K and better.
In addition to providing The Residence Collection with a door that its carefully selected installers may offer with confidence, The Residence Door Collection also provides Apeer with a ‘good, better and best’ offer for its own installer customers. Apeer44, Apeer70 and The Residence Door Collection completes the current offer by Apeer in its concerted commitment to be all door things, to all door installers in the UK and Ireland.
It’s a commitment that is comprehensive, allowing installers to realistically satisfy the styles, specifications and price points at every level of the broader replacement residential door market, from a single supplier, thus reducing complexity of supply, invoicing and, the ambitious installer may hope, a better deal too.
Apeer44 was brought to market in 2022 to provide a broad and attractive resi-door to the most popular segment. Laying down the gauntlet to some popular brands that ‘if it bows it’s free’, Apeer backed its challenge with the confidence of controlling the manufacture of its products by producing 95% of the components itself in the company’s 120,000 feet2, Ballymena factory, and 100% of full assembly, including side and top lights. GRP skins sandwich PU cores, with glass including decorative cassettes, all processed in house.
The single rebate doors offer an excellent performance/cost proposition, with thirteen new designs available when launched in the autumn of 2022, with new black furniture including bar-pull and lever handles.
Apeer70 also does exactly ‘what it says on the tin’ with a 70mm front-to-back format that elevates thermal performance to 0.8 W/m2K U value for solid doors and a 0.9-0.95 W/m2K for glazed doors (depending on the area glazed). This effectively offers the future now as the double rebated Apeer70 doors do not just easily surpass the latest requirements for Part L of Building Regulations, they’re also very well placed to meet the stricter rules that are anticipated for beyond 2025, as the UK moves toward its ambitious net zero targets.
Hitting the market on the heels of Apeer44, Apeer70 sports triple glazed cassettes produced in house including glass processing and designs, the GRP skinned/PU foam core offer and premium hardware.
The Residence Door Collection by Apeer lifts the firm’s offer beyond the reach of most, if not all of its competitors, achieved through the uncompromising requirements to sit alongside with Residence Collection windows. Offered in twenty designs initially, the sheer heft of the 120mm door and quadruple glazing units is unlike any other premium door offer. It is impressive and is guaranteed quite literally, to ‘shrink’ every other door in showroom locations. As would be expected, specification is comprehensive, including weather deflectors, and Stormguard or full frame thresholds. High quality hardware and furniture will be used throughout, with extra touches such as Ultion KeyTag-equipped, ‘Apple Find My’ trackable keys, to impress demanding homeowners.
What is shared across all three ranges is an unlimited custom paint availability, and reinforcement using aluminium anti-cut through security mesh embedded within the PU core of every door, something that may be regarded as even a little excessive in a 70mm let alone 120mm format, but there, nonetheless. All doors exceed PAS24.
Summing up what has been an extraordinary period of activity, even by Apeer standards, Asa McGillian says: “The curating of one range, development of another and scratch to launch of our top-end offer with Residence Collection, in nine months has been ‘interesting’,” he says, “but even I am delighted that we have such a confident range of products now.”
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