8383 Wilshire Blvd Beverly Hills, CA 90211

The building

8383 Wilshire Boulevard is an office building on the Beverly Hills side of the Miracle Mile, on a stretch of Wilshire that is effectively a continuous wall of commercial towers.

An awkward orientation, repeated on every floor

Wilshire runs close to east and west here, which means the long elevations of the buildings on it face north and south and the short ends take the sunrise and the sunset. That combination is more difficult than it sounds.

The south elevation is in sun for the whole working day — high overhead in summer, where a modest overhang does real work, and low and penetrating in winter, when Los Angeles is cold outside and the south-facing offices are the hottest rooms in the building. The west end takes a low sun straight down the boulevard through the late afternoon, which is while the building is still fully occupied.

Los Angeles adds its own pressure: a very high count of clear days, hot inland air during the Santa Ana months, and state energy standards that make cooling load a compliance question as well as an operating cost. In a multi-tenant tower the symptoms are always the same — perimeter offices too warm, interiors too cold, blinds down permanently, and chilled water demand peaking in the afternoon.

What window film does about it

On a building of this size the argument is usually an energy one. Lowering the solar heat gain coefficient across a large glazed area reduces the peak cooling demand, and peak demand is what commercial tariffs bill separately from consumption — so the saving appears twice, in kilowatt-hours and in demand charges. Occupant complaints fall at the same time, which is generally what triggers the inquiry in the first place.

The practical reason film gets specified over the alternatives is that it is the only measure that can be applied to a fully leased, fully occupied tower without entering the tenants' operations. It goes on the inside of the existing glass, a floor at a time, outside working hours, with no scaffold and no change to the exterior of the building.

The caveat is that the return depends completely on what is on the windows now. On single-glazed clear glass the change is dramatic. On a modern insulating unit that already has a low-emissivity coating the additional benefit is much smaller, and the right thing to do is measure the existing glazing rather than assume. If that is what we find, we will tell you, and you can spend the money elsewhere.

One further check on a building of this age on Wilshire: whether there is film on the glass already. A tower that was filmed a couple of decades ago is often still carrying dyed product that has faded, discoloured or begun to delaminate, and it contributes almost nothing now. Stripping it is a separate operation from applying the new film and it has to be priced as one.

Ace Glass Tinting is a Hawaii company. Keith Kishi holds a California license in his own name, and we have completed large commercial installations on the mainland. See our commercial work or request a quote.