The Ritz-Carlton - 4375 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292

The building

4375 Admiralty Way stands on the main channel at Marina del Rey, on the edge of one of the largest man-made small-craft harbours in the country. The guest rooms and the public areas look out over the basin.

Waterfront glazing and the reflection problem

A marina is several hectares of water and several thousand white hulls, masts and topsides, all of it in direct sun. The direct beam through a window is only part of the load on a building like this; the rest arrives from below and from the side, bouncing off water and off gelcoat at angles that no overhang, fin or fixed louvre was ever designed to intercept. A guest in a west-facing room in the late afternoon gets the sun, the sun off the water, and the sun off somebody's flybridge.

Hotels also have a comfort standard that is not negotiable. The guest arrives, opens the curtain, and the room is either comfortable or it is a conversation at the front desk. Rooms are conditioned individually by fan-coil units sized for the room, not for a glass wall facing a marina at four in the afternoon — and a fan coil running flat out is also a fan coil the guest can hear.

Salt handles the rest. Anything bolted to an elevation at Marina del Rey has a maintenance schedule attached to it from the day it goes up.

What window film does about it

Film reduces the near-infrared load and the transmitted glare, which between them are what make a waterfront room uncomfortable in the afternoon, and it removes effectively all of the ultraviolet. That last part matters more in a hotel than people expect: carpet, drapes, headboards and case goods are replaced on a refurbishment cycle, and slowing the fading moves that cycle out by years across hundreds of rooms.

Operationally it fits how a hotel has to work. One specification gives an identical result in every room, which is what matters when a guest could be in any of them. It is installed from the inside, so the building never scaffolds and the elevation never changes. And rooms can be done in rotation, a few at a time, without taking a floor out of inventory.

The limit is honest and simple: film removes radiant gain and glare. It does not quieten a fan coil, and a room with a marginal unit will still be marginal on the hottest afternoon of the year — it will just be marginal far less often.

Public areas are the other half of the case and often the easier one to justify. Lobbies, restaurants and function rooms facing a marina are glazed hard, occupied all day and finished in exactly the materials that fade, and they are the spaces a guest forms an impression in before they ever reach a room.

We work on hotel and resort glazing in Hawaii and California. See our commercial projects or request a quote.