A switchable triangular fitting room at Moose Knuckles’ first US store
Five panels, one sliding door, and no right angles
A fitting room made of glass is a good idea for about four seconds, until somebody has to use it. Moose Knuckles’ first US store wanted one anyway: a triangular glass volume in the middle of a SoHo floor, designed with Digifab, that reads as an object and not as a cubicle.
It is built from five glass panels and one glass sliding door. PriWatt film went on all six, days before the store opened.
The door, and the whole engineering problem
Five fixed panels are five ordinary jobs. The sixth is a leaf that slides, and a sliding switchable panel has to be powered wherever it happens to be. No standard sliding track is built to do that.
A custom mechanism was made for it. That is the honest version of a sentence that usually gets written as "integrated seamlessly": somebody had to design a way for a conductor to reach a moving leaf and survive being slid open and shut by shoppers, several hundred times a week, for years.
- Power travels with the leaf, through the track: the option that lets the door switch in any position
- Or the leaf switches only where it parks, which for a fitting room is the closed position and is usually all anyone wants
- Either way it is designed with whoever supplies the door gear, before the glass is made
- And it is a moving electrical connection in a public building, so it is specified for the duty cycle and not for the demonstration
In an office and in a home it is the same problem. Doors and room dividers take it up, and the range of answers (reel cables, coil wires, transfer hinges, armoured cable, custom tracking) is described on the home cinema project.
Triangular, which changes the fabrication
Nothing about a triangle is harder for the glass itself. It changes something else: no panel is a rectangle and no two are identical, so every one is fabricated to its own drawing, including where the busbar sits, because on a non-rectangular panel the busbar edge is a decision rather than a default.
PriWatt fabricates to the drawing: shapes, curves, holes, notches and cut-outs are made rather than chosen from a size list. What that requires in return is that the drawing is right, because a shaped panel cannot be trimmed on site the way a rectangle can be.
Why retail wants this at all
A fitting room is dead volume in an expensive floor. One made of glass gives the space back for every hour it is not in use.
Private in under a second
A customer closes the door and the glass goes with it. Nothing to draw and nothing to check before undressing.
Which state with no power
For a fitting room this is not an energy question. Normal mode is private unpowered, so an outage closes the room rather than opening it.
Days before opening, which is the other constraint
Retail fit-outs finish against a fixed date that cannot move, and switchable glazing arrives near the end of one — after the joinery, after the glass, and with the electrician still on site. Film is what makes that possible: it is applied to panels that are already installed, so it can be one of the last trades rather than one of the first.
The price of that is that everything it needs must already have been decided. Where the tails leave, where the transformer sits, how the door is powered and which state the room holds are all inputs to a drawing made weeks earlier. There is no version of this that is worked out in the last week.
Specified on this project
PriWatt PDLC switchable film
Self-adhesive film applied to glass already in the building. Private unpowered, clear when switched.
Public spaces
Museums, retail, hospitality and lobbies, where the glass is part of the visit.
Switchable doors
A leaf moves, so power has to cross a joint that moves with it.
A project like this one
A fitting room, a retail interior, or any glazed volume where the door has to switch as well as the walls. PriWatt makes the glass and the film in Pompano Beach, Florida, and quotes every project off its own drawings. Send dimensions, or a photograph with the sizes written on it. No drawings yet? Take the call instead.
