the best aluminium window brands in the UK

There are brands of aluminium windows that are far better known for one product than another. Cortizo arrived on the UK with their sliding door. Yet its windows are among the best designed on the market today.

Brands like Senior Architectural Aluminium or SAPA Technal, comfortably meet every specification on a landmark building, yet might struggle to supply a solution for a semi-detached house.

Judging a brand by one product tells you almost nothing about what happens when you buy from the company behind it.

This best aluminium window brands article, judges brands. The system company and what it can design across its whole range. Whether it will still be there, and still supporting the product, in fifteen years when most products are out of warranty.

Here’s a brief exlanation of the differences between companies in the supply chain.

Is this a company whose name on your project should reassure you, even though you may not deal with them directly?

Schüco

With nearly forty years in the business, minimalism, not being a priority and without budget constrains, Schüco would be in my home.

In Europe, house sales particulars often list the brand of glazing fitted, in the same way you’d market a brand of kitchen or bathroom.

Schüco is what a systems house looks like when engineering, rather than marketing, drives the business.

Curtain walling for towers, fire-rated screens, security systems tested to levels most manufacturers never approach, and building envelope products that talk to the rest of the house.

The residential range benefits from all of it, because the thinking, the testing regime and the hardware development are shared.

The security work is a good illustration of how differently this company thinks. Every window security classification in this industry assumes a closed, locked window.

Schüco’s AvanTec SimplySmart OpenSecure fitting holds RC2 burglar resistance with an open tilted window.

Across the range, the front doors, bifolds and sliding doors are the stronger products. Schüco AWS 80 casement windows do a great job, but you may prefer the styling of other brands. That is where system company repuation shows up, and that matters more a slim sightline does.

Reynaers

Reynaers occupies similar territory to Schüco.

The reputation is built on consistency. Reynaers systems are well engineered, thoroughly tested and, throughly documented.

The performance data is specific, the fabrication is first class, and the products do exactly what the paperwork says. The SL38 and SL68 windows are outstanding.

The range spans slim residential systems through to serious commercial and façade work, which puts Reynaers through the same test Schüco passes: the company’s ceiling is high, and the residential products sit on engineering developed for far more demanding applications.

Cortizo

Cortizo entered most people’s awareness in this country around 2017, when Origin’s OS-20 sliding door put a Cortizo system in front of a large consumer audience.

Specialist fabricators had been making the product here before that, but 2017 is when the name started to register in the UK.

Since then Cortizo has done, methodically, everything a systems house needs to do to take UK market share. Products designed for British tastes and British construction rather than adapted from a European suite.

A steadily widening range. A growing fabricator network. Sensible pricing. The result is that Cortizo has gone from a specialist’s choice to something approaching ubiquity in under a decade, and some people in the trade will tell you it is approaching Smart Systems levels of saturation.

Senior Architectural Systems

Senior is the brand on this list that most deserves to be better known by the people reading it.

The products are very well designed. The systems are simple to fabricate. The frustration is one of visibility.

Trade supply into the domestic replacement market has never been the priority, and the consequence is that a company making products a homeowner would be delighted with is largely invisible to them. Get in touch for more information.

Does Senior have the slimmest sightline on the market? No. Does that matter? Less than the industry pretends. The overall product proposition — design, performance, honesty about figures, and a company that knows what it is doing — is what makes a brand good. Chasing millimetres is what brands do when they have nothing else to say.

Aluprof

Aluprof is the clearest demonstration of the argument this article is built on.

If you judge Aluprof by a residential casement window, you will find a competent, well-priced product . Then you’ll discover Aluprof’s vast range. Substantial window and door products. Fire-rated systems from EI30 through to EI120. Blast-resistant and bullet-resistant glazing. Curtain walling. Smoke ventilation.

Aluprof has also invested seriously and consistently in the UK over a many years. Widely used in developments of flats and apartments, but very hard to find for the regular homeowner.

SAPA Technal

It’s a shame end user customers and the glazing industry don’t care more about the source of their windows and doors. Technal is on this list for a reason no other brand here can claim.

Every Technal product supplied in the UK is extruded using Hydro CIRCAL 75R as standard. That is aluminium containing a minimum of 75% recycled post-consumer material. This is a fantastic and visible use of recycled aluminium. In other words, genuinely end-of-life aluminium recovered from demolished buildings and scrapped products, not factory offcuts recycled back into the line, which is what most of the industry means when it says recycled.

The carbon saving against primary aluminium is around 85%. For projects that require it, CIRCAL 100R is available, made entirely from post-consumer material, at roughly 0.5kg of CO2e per kilogram of aluminium.

Every systems house in this market has a sustainability page. Almost none of them have changed what actually comes out of the extruder. Technal has, and the claim is backed by Environmental Product Declarations available through the fabricator, so it can be verified rather than merely believed.

That distinction, between a claim you can check and a claim you are invited to trust, is the single most useful test you can apply to any manufacturer in this industry.

Technal is part of Hydro, one of the largest aluminium producers in the world, which is why the material story is credible. It is not a marketing initiative bolted onto a window company. It is a window company owned by an aluminium company that decided to do this at source.

Smart Systems

Smart Systems is the entry that will provoke the most disagreement, and I want to set out the case honestly.

Plenty of people in the trade will tell you they do not much like Smart Systems. Others will say they wish they did not have to work with them. The website has looked dated for years. However, their somewhat staid product range is what the trade trusts. If you are looking for innovation, minimalism or aesthetics, it’s probably not the right brand.

And yet, Smart products, when properly made and correctly fitted will last. The fenestration trade continues to specify them in enormous volume, year after year, and trades do not keep buying products that generate callbacks.

Smart is rebranded by a great many companies precisely because it is a dependable base to build a retail brand on. Everything works, everything is affordable, and everything does what it says on the tin.

Out of warranty any competent glazier or maintenance company can work on the products.

Smart’s ubiquity has been earned over a very long period by products that simply do not cause trouble. In a market obsessed with novelty, “it works and it keeps working” is a legitimate reason to be on a list of the best.

Of the current range, the Signature and Designer front doors are the strongest products the company makes, and both are genuinely competitive rather than merely adequate.

Whilst not a systems company, the following aluminium window and door brands have built their brand and do it well. Between the systems company and your home, is a diverse supply chain beyond delivery of aluminium profiles and accessories. That is manufacturing, installation and related trades.

None of that is controlled by the systems house yet play a big role in your satisfaction with your new windows and doors.

Express Bifolding Doors

Express is a substantial brand, and it did not get there by owning a system. It uses profile from Reynaers, Smart, Aluprof and others. It belongs on this list for what the company itself has built.

Express showrooms are a sight to behold. You can see the product in context, operate it, understand the scale of it and grasp what it would actually feel like in a house.

Everybody followed. If you have visited a good glazing showroom in the last decade and come away genuinely better informed, you are experiencing something Express established. They continue to invest and continue to open new sites, which in this market is not nothing.

But the showrooms would count for little without what sits behind them. The manufacturing quality is outstanding and consistent. Service levels are equally impressive and the company is very strict on its supply chain if they are getting let down. The whole experience, from first enquiry through survey, manufacture, installation and aftercare promises an altogether better experience.

Any company can invest in marketing. Few can invest in marketing and then consistently deliver on it.

If Express don’t offer a product, it means it’ll either disrupt their service levels or nothing worthy of them making it yet exists. Express has built know-how and reputation into a brand of their own. This is why we think it’s one of the best aluminium window brands

Everglade Windows and the aïr brand

Everglade has been making aluminium in West London for over forty years, which puts it among the earliest UK aluminium manufacturers, using this material long before it became desirable for domestic property.

The aïr brand is both Everglade’s own design and a rebrand of top end systems. Either product perfectly demonstrates service, quality and reputation. Everglade has invested substantially in product development and built a range with its own identity, the MOD Series covering contemporary, flush, tilt and turn and heritage windows, with a suite of door products alongside. The MOD Series has won a Build It award for the windows specifically, which is a window credential rather than a company one, and the company has taken Fabricator of the Year and a G Award for customer care.

The Winluxe Group: Aluco and Evolution

Aluco and Evolution sit under the newly formed Winluxe Group, and the reason they are here is the same reason Express and Everglade are here. The fabricator brand carries meaning that the system underneath it does not fully explain.

Aluco is in our view, the best steel look system available in the UK today. Evolution occupies quite different territory, offering timber-look upvc products that created a market segment.

Evolution is not aluminium, and it is fair to ask what it is doing in this article. The answer is that this list judges companies, not individual products. A fabricator that can take uPVC which many regard as the budget option, and produce something a period property owner will actually accept. Evolution is here as evidence of what the group is capable of, creating.

Between these, the latest front doors, window hardware and internal doors, Winluxe Group is focused on brands that deliver something genuinely different from regular windows and doors.

The group’s strength is manufacturing and supply consistency across a broad range, supported by a nationwide showroom presence and dealer network.

The brands that did not make it, and why

A list of ten is only as honest as its omissions. These are the names some might expect to see, with the reasoning set out rather than left implied.

Origin

Here is my reasoning for why Origin did not make the list.

Origin has the best marketing, branding and installer proposition in this industry. That is not a backhanded compliment. They have solved, comprehensively, almost every problem an installer faces.

Showroom support, brand recognition strong enough that homeowners arrive asking for it by name, literature that makes a retailer look serious, vehicle livery, lead generation, guarantees that are simple to explain, and a supply operation that delivers when it says it will.

If you are an installer, working with Origin removes an enormous amount of friction from your business. If you are a homeowner, you benefit from that indirectly. The buying experience is smooth and the company behind it is stable.

None of which is that product focused. Look past the outstanding marketing language at the products themselves. There is very little that a product designer or engineer would point to and call outstanding. All the above brands have unique features in their products. Origin does not.

Origin products are hugely competent and there is no bad here, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. But competent is not the same as excellent. The gap between origin and other companies is marketing might. The gap between other brands and Origin is how they engineer them and what they’re capable of. Even a first time buyer looking at an Origin bifold track with a Schüco track side by side will instantly see why Schüco is engineered the way it is.

Sheerline

Sheerline, from Garnalex, has more genuine claim on the reader’s attention than anything else in this section, and it is a close call.

The case for it is real. UK extrusion. In-house finishing. A system designed from a clean sheet specifically for aluminium, rather than adapted from a suite originally drawn for another purpose or another market. In an industry where almost nothing changes, Sheerline is the only company in recent years to have attempted anything genuinely new. That deserves acknowledgement.

The problem for me with Sheerline, as good as it is, is that the people behind the company are mostly from a hugely successful uPVC background and it does show within the styling of some of their products.

The Sheerline roof is brilliantly designed, elegant, sleek and installers love how it comes together and completes a room. The colour and foiling options are also innovative and refreshing to see for aluminium. So Sheerline nearly made it, but their products lack that eye-catching appeal.

Kawneer

In another time and place, Kawneer would be up there with Schüco and Reynaers.

Kawneer is part of Arconic, and Arconic’s conduct in relation to Grenfell is part of that brand’s record whatever the merits of the fenestration division. A consumer-facing list of the best brands cannot set that aside.

Aluk Systems

Two of the omissions sit either side of the same problem.

Origin has the marketing and the brand recognition, but the engineering does not match it.

AluK has the engineering, the performance figure transparency and the installer trust, but are homeowners aware of the brand? A brand needs both.

Judged only on product, AluK would be on this list and Origin would not. Judged only on visibility in the market, it would be the other way round.

How to use this list

None of these ten names guarantees you a good window. How they are made and the installation is just as important. However our lists can he used to discover new brands of windows.

Or you can get in touch for windows suitable for your particular project.

The first column comes from the brand. The second comes from whoever you actually buy from.

Talk to DWE for your aluminium windows

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If you are planning a new build, an extension or a major glazing purchase, get in touch before you commit. Putting you in front of the right installer is exactly what this website exists for.