Mirrors for Birregurra Community Centre, Fitted So They Can Come Back Off
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The Birregurra Community Centre needed a full wall of mirrors for a newly finished activity room. The sort of room a community hall asks to do everything, so dance one night, fitness the next, and whatever else is booked in that week.
The brief had one condition that changed how we approached the whole job. The mirrors had to be able to come back off the wall.
Why removable mattered here
Mirrors are usually stuck up. Mirror adhesive on the back, pressed to the wall, and that is where they stay for the rest of their life. It works, it is quick, and it is completely permanent.
The trouble with permanent is what happens at the end. If the group using the room moves on, the mirrors stay behind. If a lease ends, they stay behind. If the wall ever needs work, getting them off means breaking them, and pulling mirror adhesive off plasterboard usually takes the plasterboard with it.
For a community building, where the tenant, the use of the room and the budget can all change, that is a lot of value permanently attached to a wall.
How the J channel system works
Instead of adhesive, the mirrors sit in aluminium J channel.
The channel is an extruded aluminium section with a J shaped profile. One run is fixed along the wall at the bottom and another along the top. The bottom channel carries the weight, so it goes on first and it goes on dead level. The top channel holds the mirror back against the wall.
The mirror is then lifted up into the top channel, dropped down into the bottom one, and it sits there under its own weight. Nothing fixes the glass to the wall. The only thing attached to the building is the channel.
Taking a panel out is the same move in reverse. Lift it up into the top channel far enough to clear the bottom lip, swing the base out, and lower it clear.
What that means at the end of a lease
The mirrors are not part of the building. They are removable fittings that belong to whoever paid for them.
If the group at Birregurra ever moves to another space, the mirrors go with them. A new set of channels gets fixed in the new room and the same glass slots straight back in. What stays behind is two lengths of aluminium and a handful of fixing holes.
The photograph above of the bare channels on the wall is, near enough, what that room would look like the day the mirrors left it.
That is a very different conversation to writing off a wall of mirror glass because it is glued to a wall you do not own.
Safety backed, because it is a public room
The mirrors themselves are safety backed. A polymer backing is bonded to the rear of the glass behind the silvering, and it stays there for the life of the mirror.
Break a plain mirror and it comes off the wall in pieces. Break a safety backed one and the backing holds the fragments together, so the panel cracks and stays where it is rather than emptying onto the floor.
In a room where people are moving around, in a building the public walks into, that is simply the right specification. It matters more again with a channel system. An adhesive fixed mirror has glue across the whole back of it, which does some of that job by accident. A mirror standing in channel has nothing behind it, so the backing is the only thing holding a broken panel together.
It adds very little to the cost of the glass and it is not worth leaving out of a hall, a gym, a studio, a school or a childcare room.
Getting a mirror wall to look right
A single sheet of mirror this size is not practical to make, transport, or carry through a doorway, so a wall like this is built from panels butted up against each other.
The joins are what people notice. Run the channel a few millimetres out of level over that distance and the joins open up at one end, and every reflection in the room steps as it crosses the seam.
So most of the time goes into the setout rather than the glass. Find the true level of the floor, which is rarely the same as the level of the skirting, work out exactly where the top and bottom of the mirrors need to land, and fix the channel to that rather than to whatever the wall happens to be doing.
Where this suits
Anywhere the mirrors might need to come off again, or where the person paying for them does not own the wall.
- Community centres and public halls
- Dance and performance studios
- Gyms and personal training spaces in leased units
- Yoga and pilates rooms
- Physio and rehabilitation rooms
- School and sporting club activity rooms
- Any leased commercial tenancy
It also suits any wall you would rather not damage. Heritage rooms, freshly finished walls, and anywhere a landlord has been specific about make good conditions at the end of a lease.
Mirrors across Geelong and the Otways
Birregurra is about forty minutes west of us, and we cover that run out through Winchelsea, Colac and the Otways the same as we cover Geelong itself.
If you are putting mirrors into a room you lease, or a room whose use might change, it is worth asking about channel before you commit to adhesive. It costs a little more to install and it keeps the glass yours.
