Project Components
- System: Bay Area Railings Base Shoe Glass Rail System
- Mounting Type: Y mount
- Base Shoe: Q-Railing Y mount base shoe
- Top Bar Type: Thin aluminum top rail
- Glass: 1/2" clear tempered glass
- Finish: Matte Black Powder Coat
- City: Danville
- Price: Starting at $450 per linear foot installed
Project Overview
This Danville house is dark board-and-batten with a deep slatted pergola running the length of the deck, and the ground drops away to open hills behind it. The pergola already casts a strong grid of shadow across the whole space, so the last thing the deck needed was another set of vertical lines at its edge. The guard had to sit quietly under the architecture rather than compete with it.
We built our Base Shoe Glass Rail System along the deck and down the return. The glass is 1/2 inch clear tempered, carried in a continuous Q-Railing Y mount base shoe, with a thin aluminum top rail capping the panels – all of it powder coated matte black to match the pergola and the siding. The shoe sits above the cedar fascia band, so the dark cap, the dark shoe and the dark posts of the pergola read as one line.
Base shoe suits this deck because the run is long and uninterrupted and the owners wanted nothing standing up out of it. The thin top rail is what lets the glass be tempered rather than laminated – it gives the panels a continuous edge restraint – and it also draws a single crisp line at hand height that ties back into the pergola above. Y mount pulls the shoe off the fascia so the wood band below stays visible from the yard.
