In order to create an ambitious indoor/outdoor eatery at Miami’s renowned Bal Harbour Shops, the in-house design team for Hillstone Restaurant Group had to go through a particular kind of window shopping. In turning to Hope’s®, leading manufacturer of custom steel and bronze windows and doors, Project Architect Rakesh Patel found the solutions to help showcase South Florida’s best weather while also keeping guests safe from its worst.
For Hillstone’s variety of restaurants across the country — in Texas, California, and New York, among others — Patel’s team tailors every aspect of each venue to craft a special and localized experience for diners. “We tend to design each location independently, taking into account site, history, patron influences, and surrounding architecture. No two restaurants are aesthetically alike,” Patel says. “They may share some common elements, but the overall architecture is unique to that location.” For The Grill at Bal Harbour, which opened in 2015, the region’s natural beauty and architecture offered plenty of inspiration.
Built in 1965, the modernist, open-air mall on the north end of Miami Beach was developed to accentuate Florida’s weather and greenery. Original architects Herbert H. Johnson and Associates conceived lush, mid-century style walkways in lieu of a standard enclosed mall structure. Hillstone acquired a 6,400 square foot space on the property last year to develop a new second floor dining room. Suspended above the mall’s main entrance, the new restaurant would offer diners a birdseye view of palm trees and the surrounding shops — some of the first and most successful luxury boutiques in the United States.
“The mid-century American Modern design was a reflection of what we felt the heritage of Bal Harbour Shops was, and we wanted to be complementary to that ideal,” says Patel. Expanding and updating the site’s modernist roots, Patel’s design called for a massive 13 foot by 12 foot curved on plan glass and hot-rolled steel frame section with a motorized system to vertically open windows on demand.
“We wanted the sash windows to be operated with a push of a button to open up the entire restaurant and make it feel like an open-air, outdoor dining room.”
In addition, the strength of hot-rolled solid steel frames allowed for the creation of a 90 degree butt glazed corner to complement the open-air design.
Of course, Miami’s weather does not always agree with such fluid indoor/outdoor spaces. Bal Harbour’s beautiful location between the bay and the Atlantic Ocean also means a high risk of hurricane-force winds. “Typically in High Velocity Hurricane Zones (HVHZs), business owners and residents opt to install metal shutters to protect the openings from wind loading and debris impact,” says Patel. For the desired al fresco atmosphere, Patel needed a narrow framed window system that would maximize glass area while being strong enough to meet Miami-Dade codes without using obstructive shutters.
“Hope’s is one of the very select few, if not the only, steel profile window manufacturers that meets the demanding Miami-Dade impact and wind loading hurricane standards,” Patel says. Full scale mock-ups of Hope’s Jamestown175™ Series hot-rolled solid steel windows are engineered, fabricated, and tested in simulated environments. The narrow frames exceeded the 120 mile per hour wind and large missile impact standards required for this project.
With Hope’s Jamestown175™ Series windows and a 5000 Series™ pocket door, Patel was able to realize his open-air vision for the grill by encompassing the automated features and the large curved glass window. Finding the right windows to make it possible might have been difficult, but, Patel says, “Hope’s was up for the challenge.”
