Roy's - 8670 Genesee Avenue, San Diego, CA 92122

The building

8670 Genesee Avenue is a restaurant site in the University City district of San Diego, inland of La Jolla, on a commercial stretch of the avenue.

Restaurants have a sun problem offices do not

The difficulty is one of timing. In an office the worst of the sun and the busiest part of the day only partly overlap. In a restaurant they are the same thing. The dining room fills from six, and in southern California the sun is low and direct from around five until it goes down. A guest seated at a window table cannot move; you either seat people into the glare or you stop selling the best tables in the room. Service staff walk into it carrying plates.

What people complain about at that hour is not air temperature. It is radiant heat — sun landing on the side of the face and on the arm nearest the window — and a thermostat has no visibility of it at all. The room can be at the right temperature and the window seats still unusable.

The load is the other half. A restaurant is already contending with a kitchen putting several kilowatts of sensible heat into the building, a full room of people, and a make-up air system that has to replace everything the extract hood removes. Add a glazed west wall in the afternoon and the dining room is warm before the first cover is seated.

The finishes fade on the same exposure: banquettes, timber, artwork, menus, and any wine held on display — which is the most heat- and light-sensitive stock a restaurant carries.

What window film does about it

Film cuts the radiant component directly, which is the part guests actually feel, and it does it without hanging anything in front of the window. Rejecting most of the near infrared brings the afternoon load down so the system is not fighting the glass as well as the kitchen; reducing visible transmission makes the golden hour workable at the tables that earn the most; and removing effectively all of the ultraviolet slows what the sun does to the interior.

It should be said plainly that this addresses one half of a restaurant's comfort problem. Film does nothing about kitchen heat, extract or make-up air, which in many sites is the larger half. It handles the half that arrives through the glass, and that is usually the half nobody has touched.

Wine is worth singling out. Bottles held anywhere the sun reaches are exposed to both of the things that spoil wine fastest — heat and ultraviolet — and a display rack near a west window can be a costly place to keep stock. Removing the ultraviolet and most of the infrared makes a glazed dining room a far less hostile place to store it, though it is not a substitute for a proper cellar temperature.

The installation itself fits around a restaurant's week. It is interior work with no scaffold, no plant and no exterior change, and a dining room can be filmed on a closed day or overnight between services.

We work on restaurant, retail and hospitality glazing in Hawaii and California. See our commercial work or request a quote.