Customisable | with Philip Negus, APL Market Development

Philip sits down with Simon Farrell-Green, editor of HERE magazine, to discuss what customisable windows and doors means for projects in New Zealand. Our climate, architectural design, and the way we live is unique to any other part of the world, so product choices need to reflect that. Listen more as Phil explains what those product choices include.

00:00 Introduction  
00:37 Philip’s Introduction  
01:54 Customisable window and door frames and what makes them unique  
03:48 Technology in windows and doors  
05:39 How the different ranges work together when designing or building a home 
06:48 How APL window systems respond to recent building code changes around thermal performance

🎙️ About the Series – Made here, for you
Made here, for you is a storytelling series by APL & AGP, shining a light on the people, places, and processes behind New Zealand-made windows and doors. Every episode captures the craft, care, and Kiwi ingenuity that make our products truly local and built to last.

🏠 Explore Our Brands
• Altherm Window Systems
• First Windows & Doors
• Vantage Windows & Doors

🌿 Proudly NZ-Made
From design to delivery, every window system is created here in Aotearoa supporting local manufacturing, innovation, and communities nationwide.

💬 Connect with Us
LinkedIn YouTube Instagram Facebook

Produced by APL. All rights reserved.
“Made here, for you” stories of New Zealand-made windows and doors, told by the people who bring them to life.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:37 Philip’s Introduction
• 1:54 Customisable window and door frames and what makes them unique
• 3:48 Technology in windows and doors
• 5:39 How the different ranges work together when designing or building a home

Transcript

0:00

Kia ora, I'm Simon Farrell Green and I'm the editor of Hair Magazine. Welcome to New Zealand made, a series of podcasts we're making with our friends at APL Window Systems. The question we're asking is essentially, what does it mean to build or renovate in an increasingly global and interconnected world? And how do we balance a desire to reduce carbon emissions and improve the performance of our buildings with the ever increasing cost of building? To answer this, we're chatting with the experts at APL on the latest developments in building tech and a few other issues as well. I'm joined now by Phil Negus from Market Development at APL. Hi Phil. Hi Simon. So I thought it'd start with a bit of a funny one. Tell us who you are, what you do and why you do it and you've got 50 words or less to do that. Okay well I work within the market development team. My primary role is to visit architects or respond to architectural requests for assistance. Usually it's project-specific work and so I'll go in and provide a technical solution to whatever issue they're having. That's one of my roles. One of my other roles is to attend events that we support certain sector organisations, membership organisations, awards, so forth and so on, that sort of stuff. So market-facing role but also there's a technical element to what I initially have to do. Now by achieving specification through an architectural practice what we're giving is our manufacturer as an opportunity to price the work. There's a lot of chat in the building industry about standardisation and you can sort of understand why people would want that on some levels but your frames come with all manner of customisation. Why is that and what makes it possible? Yeah I think that's a really good question because we've always offered that flexibility with our manufacturing network and the products that we can do. What we do see is a lot of mixed use of our product as well. So we have different ranges of product that perform at different levels but often you'll have a house that may be designed. It doesn't need either the very top-speak product and it can actually to try and help manage the budget you can actually go down to a lower specification level to actually get that building everyone closed up with a high-performance system. But even within that, even if we're chopping and changing between different products and that sort of thing, the level of customisation in terms of height width, how many sliders it's got, all that sort of stuff is pretty unique. It is fairly unique to New Zealand and Sephora is the way we build our homes and the way that they are designed. I think you can drive down quite a few residential streets in any main centre in New Zealand and find that there are very few houses that look identical. They're either orientated at a different way or they're completely different design. So we do have a uniqueness in the way that we design and build some of our homes here and obviously our product can cater for that. The increase in cost doesn't necessarily double once you get over a certain height or a certain width. It's usually like a pro-rata sort of increase in both aluminium and glass and so forth. I mean, what can't we do these days with windows and doors? It seems like the kind of increasing tech going into them, especially in those sort of two or three years, is kind of extraordinary. Technology has been the challenge because particularly when you start getting to electronics, building management systems that people want, a home automation system integrated into, say, their window systems in their house, has definitely products available but we're always developing new products to try and accommodate some of those advances in technology. So yeah, it is a challenge but I think we've sort of kept up with the pace of technology. A lot of the electronic systems we see primarily for residential homes is usually a digital or a keyless entry to the property where we're starting to see more automation with regards to auto door gear on very large scale sliding door systems for example. That's fairly new and a lot of it does come back to the performance of the product as well, how you want the product to perform. And I guess as you get to those bigger pains of glass and those bigger frames and heavier frames, it sort of becomes necessary doesn't it to start integrating but at that really high level starts to start integrating that sort of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. We've worked hard to try and ensure that our roller systems provide smooth rolling effortless but in some cases when the doors are three or four hundred kilos each, you actually do need assisted rollers or assisted movement of those doors. Phil, how do the different ranges work together when you're designing or building a house? Often that becomes a performance based solution. An example of that would be that if people are putting a large scale large format window door into their lounge or living area that may require the use of the architectural series but for the remainder of the house they may not need that performance requirement so they could actually use either the metro or the residential product. Now what we've done over the years is we've actually deliberately designed the product so there's a lot of visual consistency in the way they look particularly from the outside. So if you're using a residential window in one area and an architectural window in another area they both have this flat square appearance on the outside. It'd be very hard to actually tell the difference. The only difference is perhaps from the inside because there's a little bit more framing around the architectural series but I think at that point you may be not looking at the framing, you're perhaps looking beyond the framing or through the glass in the window at the view beyond. So one of the biggest changes I think probably to building in general in the last few years is being the changes to the New Zealand building code particularly around thermal performance to ensure that we reduce our carbon emissions and have better performing houses. How do APL's window systems respond to that or how have you responded to that? Well we responded to that by having a system approach rather than just individual components. So in the past we didn't really have the ability to bring those all together so that people can actually source them from one place, one of our manufacturers for example. So we look at the window frame as one part of that system, we look at the glass, so a high performance soft coat low E and then we also looked at the position of the window within the wall framing. And so if you put all of those things together, the way we looked at that sort of system approach is that you can't deal with some of those changes just on those individual component bases and they have to work together. So it's sort of incremental levels of change and increase in performance that sort of let us down that pathway of product development. And I think we also recognise because we're new New Zealand based manufacturers, we live in New Zealand, we understand the varying climate zones between say Auckland and central Otago and so we have products that can perform to each of those climate zones across the New Zealand because we're in Auckland as well and we're also in central Otago. The other thing with regards to performance to the new building code requirements is yeah people are now starting to look at energy consumption with their homes, the overheating of the spaces within the homes and also looking at supply chains, where does the product come from, how much embodied carbon or operational carbon does it take to get that product into your house and how that product is going to perform over its lifetime. Thank you Phil, that was Phil Negus from Market Development at APL, talked to us about customisation as part of our New Zealand made podcast series. Thank you.