A showroom is not a trade fair booth with longer opening hours. A booth gets three days and a crowd that arrived already interested; a showroom gets years and people who walk in off the street with one specific problem in their house. That single difference changes almost every decision you make about the floor. In ALPES aluminum windows and doors showroom design, the useful question is never "how many products can we fit on the wall". It is whether a visitor who knows nothing about profiles can, without a salesperson standing next to them, operate a sash, compare two of them, see what is inside the frame, and leave holding a sample. Floor area that does none of those four things is decoration.
This article is written for dealers, distributors and contractors fitting out a permanent display space. It stays away from mood boards and talks about the parts that actually change the plan: frame depth, what has to be operable, what a cutaway is worth, how to light a colour wall honestly, and what to settle in writing before the first stud goes up.
Most display advice is written for exhibitions and quietly fails in a retail space, because the two are optimising for opposite things. A booth is designed to stop people walking past. A showroom is designed to let people slow down and stay.
| Decision | Trade fair booth | Permanent showroom |
|---|---|---|
| How long it has to work | A few days, then it is scrap | Years, and it has to survive its own range changing |
| What the visitor wants | To find out who you are in two minutes | To solve one opening in one house, and to be sure before paying |
| Who does the explaining | You, all day, at close range | The product, because you are often with another customer |
| Operable or static | Static is usually enough; the crowd is looking, not buying | Anything a customer is asked to pay for should work under their hand |
| Cost per square metre | High, and written off as a marketing event | Amortised over years, so the cheap detail that fails twice is the expensive one |
| Failure looks like | Nobody stopped | They liked it, went home, and bought from someone who let them try it |
The practical consequence: a booth can be a picture wall, a showroom cannot. If a visitor has to be told that the sash glides smoothly, you have lost the one advantage a physical space has over your own website.
Every display opening has to be built to a real dimension, and the one that catches fit-out contractors out is not the width or the height. It is depth. A system window or door frame has a physical front-to-back dimension, and your stud wall, bulkhead or mock facade has to be at least that deep before the unit will sit in it properly, seal, and look like it belongs rather than like it was glued on.
Below are the published frame widths for the ALPES range. Read them as the minimum clear depth of the display wall you are building, not as a sightline figure.
| Series | Frame width (mm) | Glass sash thickness (mm) | Mullion (mm) | Note for the display build |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AW90 Passive / inward-opening | 90 | 90 | 72/4 | Shallowest frame in the range; the easiest to build into a standard stud bulkhead |
| C113 outward-opening | 113 | 57 | 75/21 | Needs a wall deep enough that the frame does not project past the plasterboard face |
| C116 outward-opening | 116 | 81 | 58/22 | Deepest sash in the casement range; the section display is worth more than the flat panel |
| C120 outward-opening | 119 | 62 | 75/31 | Integrated sash and mesh on one frame; the mesh face also needs clearance |
| TS130 side press window | 130 | 55 | - | Needs wall depth plus the travel path of the moving sash |
| SL112/167 sliding door | 112 (1-2 track) / 167 (3 track) | 43 | - | Track count changes the depth; the wall has to be built for the configuration on order |
| SL126/182 (75) sliding door | 126 (2 track) / 182 (3 track) | 55 | - | Deepest frame in the sliding range; do not assume a standard partition will take it |
| SL126/182 (96) sliding door | 126 (2 track) / 182 (3 track) | 55 | - | Same frame depth as the 75 version; the difference is the sash edge, not the wall |
| SL155 thermal break sliding door | 155 (4 track) | 54.5 | - | Four tracks in 155 mm; a compact way to show a wide opening in a shallow wall |
If your floor also serves trade customers, the SL112/167 heavy-duty range is usually what an industrial sliding door wholesaler or a builder asks about first, and it is the clearest illustration of why depth has to be confirmed per configuration: 112 mm for a single or two-track unit, 167 mm for three tracks, on the same series.
One trap in that table is worth calling out. Frame depth is a property of the series, not a function of track count. The four-track SL155 is 155 mm deep, which is shallower than the three-track SL126/182 at 182 mm. If you tell your contractor "more tracks means a deeper wall", you will end up with a bulkhead built for the wrong series and a very expensive re-fit.
The second trap is travel. A two-track sliding unit needs the moving sash to pass the fixed one, so the opening in your display wall is wider than the piece of glass the customer sees. Work out sliding door sizes from the configuration, not from a photograph in a catalogue, and give your contractor the open dimension and the slide direction in millimetres before anything is ordered.
Most showrooms fail because every product is displayed the same way. They should not be. Each display type in a well-planned room is answering a different question, and the layout works when all five questions get answered somewhere on the floor.
| Display type | The question it answers | What it costs you | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-size operable bay | Can I live with this every day? | The most floor area and the most structural work | Building it too small, so the weight and travel that sell it disappear |
| Section or cutaway | What is actually inside it? | Almost no floor area; a shelf or a wall niche | Cutting the wrong end, so none of the interesting parts are visible |
| Pull-out comparison rack | Which of these twelve? | A fixed strip of floor, one person can browse it alone | Panels that cannot be removed, so the rack is obsolete the day the range changes |
| Colour and hardware wall | What will it look like at my place? | Wall area only | Lighting it with a warm spot, so nothing matches in daylight |
| Screen or digital station | What happens after I say yes? | Hardware, content, and someone to keep it current | Showing a corporate video when the visitor wants an installation detail |
You cannot afford to make every unit operable, so spend the budget where the motion is the argument.
Must be operable: the side press window. The TS130 exists to solve the one thing a normal slider does badly: sealing. Its sash presses sideways against a continuous four-sided seal over the last few centimetres of travel, using German ROTO side-pressure hardware with an eight-point locking system and 200 kg pulleys. Shut, it looks exactly like an ordinary sliding window. If a customer cannot push it and feel the compression, you are displaying a rectangle of glass and asking them to take your word for the rest.
Must be operable: lift-and-slide. The SL126/182 range runs on a lift-slide action, and the whole selling point is how little effort a very large panel takes once it is lifted off its seals. That is a sensation, not a specification. A static panel of the same size sells nothing except the view.
Must be operable: tilt and turn. The tilt position is the hardest configuration to explain in words and the easiest to demonstrate in four seconds. If you carry tilt and turn windows for sale, the AW90 should be the unit you walk a customer to first: 360-degree locking point distribution, Winkhaus hardware with optional C-Slot ROTO, and a published K-value of 1.3 on the passive configuration.
Operable, but plan the swing. Outward-opening casements (C120, C116, C113) need a clear arc. In a house that arc falls into the garden; in a showroom it falls into your circulation. Either recess the unit into a mock facade so it opens into a dead zone, or place it where the open sash reads as an invitation rather than an obstacle. A customer who has to step around an open sash remembers the awkwardness, not the window.
Can stay a sample: colour panels, mesh types, glass build-ups, and handle options. Nobody needs to open a sash to decide they prefer Starry Sky Gray to Brown Coffee.
A sectioned frame costs a fraction of a full operable bay and answers the question that quietly loses sales: what am I actually paying for? Four cuts are worth having.
Label every cutaway in the visitor's language, not the factory's. "Where the water leaves" sells. "Passive check valve drainage" is a thing people nod at and forget.
The standard ALPES finishes are Ice Cream White, Aurora Gray, Starry Sky Gray and Brown Coffee, with custom colour matching available. A 100 mm swatch lit by a warm spot and a two-metre frame standing in daylight are not the same colour, and customers who pick from the swatch come back unhappy. Three rules keep that from happening: put the operable bays where real daylight falls, light the colour wall in the same character of light as the bays, and keep a loose sample of each finish by the door so people can walk outside with it.
Hardware deserves its own board, because it is where a lot of the price difference lives and it is easy to demonstrate. ROTO transmission boxes and anti-pry lock points, Winkhaus full hardware sets, CMECH handles with a German Red Dot award and 30,000-cycle testing, and Wehag hardware as an upgrade on C116. Let people work a handle repeatedly; CMECH's cycle figure means more when they have opened it ten times. C116 is worth showing with both of its handle options, the baseless 90-degree handle and the side-mount handle, because that is a decision customers did not know they had.
Do the same with mesh: the 40# black stainless standard on C120 and AW90, the 80# black or grey option, and the black high-definition anti-PM2.5 mesh available on C113 and C116. Mesh is a small line on an order and a daily annoyance in a house, which is a good combination for a showroom.
A 360 m² aluminium joinery showroom reorganised in Rouiba, Algiers, is a useful model to copy even at a smaller scale. It was arranged as three zones on a single circulation axis: a fixed-panel zone for reading the product range at a glance, a pivoting zone where sashes could be physically worked, and a reception zone for talking. That ordering matters more than the finishes.
Keep one circulation route, not a maze. A single legible path past every zone does more than clever angles, and it means one staff member can see the whole floor.
Being honest about the split saves everyone time. A manufacturer can supply real operable units built to the dimensions you specify, section and corner samples, hardware and colour swatches, and the drawings that carry the numbers you need: 6060-T66 profiles from 1.8 to 2.5 mm, PA66GF25 insulation strips, published K-values of 1.3 on AW90, 1.6 on C120 and 1.7 on C116, 240-hour salt spray resistance and 5,000 N shear strength on AW90, and frame widths, sash thicknesses, mullion dimensions and track heights for every series. Those documents are what your architect and your contractor actually need.
What a factory cannot do is design your interior, run local electrical and plasterboard work, or certify your display structure against local codes. That is your architect and your contractor, and it should stay that way. A showroom is a local building project that happens to contain windows; it is not a window order.
One practical request worth making early: ask for section samples and corner samples to travel with the first order rather than as a separate later shipment. They are small, they are cheap to add to a container, and in most showrooms they do more of the selling than the most expensive bay on the floor. If the showroom sits inside a dealer agreement, get the sample terms in writing at the same time: which samples are supplied, which are charged, and what happens when the range is updated.
Enough that one of each motion is covered: one side press, one lift-and-slide, one tilt and turn, one outward casement. Everything else can be a panel. Customers generalise from a motion, not from a model number, so covering the four motions beats covering nine series.
They can, and for casements it barely matters. For large sliding doors it matters a great deal, because the size is the product. A 1.5 m version of a door sold at 2.5 m demonstrates the mechanism and hides the reason people buy it. If the full size will not fit, say so plainly and put the real dimensions on the label.
A sunroom corner works well as a context display rather than a product bay, because it lets a visitor stand inside the thing they are considering instead of in front of it. It is also the one place where glazing, frame depth and drainage can be judged together in a single glance.
Building the display walls before the frame depths are confirmed. It produces bulkheads that are too shallow for the series eventually ordered, and the fix means cutting out finished work. Confirm depths, then build.
They change the conversation. A customer who has seen a sealed corner and a drained threshold stops asking "is it good" and starts asking "which one suits my opening", which is the question a salesperson can actually close on.
Refresh the samples and the colour wall whenever the range changes, and the operable bays when they stop working smoothly. A stiff sash in a showroom is worse than no sash at all, because the customer assumes the whole range feels like that. Budget for adjustment and cleaning as a recurring cost, not a one-off.
The test for any layout is simple. Walk in as though you know nothing, without a member of staff, and try to find out what makes one window worth more than another. If the room answers that in five minutes, it will sell. If it needs you to answer it, you have built a very expensive brochure.
