Olav Skretteberg looks at trends in the windows and doors market.

When it comes to fitting new doors or windows, a few questions instantly spring to the specifier’s mind – what will they cost? How will they look? How will they perform?  And, traditionally with timber products, how long will they last?

Today's timber products made from softwoods such as pine or spruce can provide the kind of answers that every buyer wants to hear.  Thanks to the use of high-quality materials, great design and manufacture, and modern preservative technology, softwood external joinery delivers on all counts, including durability. Beautiful – often bespoke– products are now available at competitive prices, can be maintained easily and can last for 75 years or more.

But you have to ask: is product longevity what the individual homeowner really wants nowadays?  Increasingly, there’s evidence that a fitting's lifespan is often not the customer’s primary concern.

For example, homeowners simply do not want to maintain a bathroom or a kitchen which was installed in 1930, even though it’s possible.  This is not only a question of the state of repair, but rather, the state of technology and of course, of fashion.  Improvements in available products have been so huge over the past three-quarters of a century that whilst durability and low maintenance costs may represent good value for money, fifteen or twenty year old products don’t offer the kind of look, performance and functionality that modern customers expect. 

The case is the same for windows and doors: replacing older fittings in favour of more modern, energy efficient models is increasingly becoming a sensible choice, rather than a pre-determined necessity. For example, over the past decade the U-value of windows has dropped on average from 2.8 to 1.4 W/M2K, halving the energy transition.  As energy prices continue to increase, using up-to-date fittings can help reduce energy bills, which brings benefits to both pocket and planet.

Olav Skretteberg, an independent windows and doors supplier predicts that:

'the lifespan of a modern window or door will be fifteen years.  In today's property market longevity is no longer the only issue – performance, particularly thermal performance, and fashionable good looks are vitally important too'.
 
In the past, in Britain, timber joinery products could be of variable quality and durability, leaving an opportunity for PVC doors and windows to gain popularity.  Seductive strap lines like 'fit and forget' played on the perceived low maintenance and durability of plastic windows. But the market success of PVC is now being challenged by good quality, good value timber windows and doors. These are often imported from Scandinavia, where there is a tradition of high quality timber products, from well managed forests, regulated by nationally recognised quality assurance systems. Given that timber joinery has nearly 100% market penetration in Scandinavia, timber products there are also constantly developing technically, to respond to internal competition.

Nowadays, in the UK, timber windows account for some *25% of the market, a figure which has been steadily on the rise since the mid 1990s.  This change in the marketplace is related not only to the improvement in cost and performance of the timber products available, but also to an increasing awareness of ecological issues.

Environmentally aware specifiers and homeowners welcome the fact that timber windows are manufactured using the construction industry’s only truly renewable and bio-degradable material, in a process which uses just *one fifth of the energy required to make a comparable PVC window.

*source WWF