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Your home or office entrance is more than just a door! It's the boundary between the outside world and the sanctuary of the indoors. It sets the tone for what lies beyond. In combining functionality and aesthetics, every detail is important.
Glass canopies stand out as a superior choice, offering protection, safety, and an elegant design that can enhance any facade.
When choosing a glass canopy, the material selection is extremely important. Glass can be tempered, laminated or both.
Tempered glass is known for its durability and safety features. It's designed to be stronger than regular glass, and if it breaks, it crumbles into small pieces, not sharp shards, significantly reducing the risk of injury. Due to this safety aspect, tempered glass is ideally suited for glass canopies over entrances, where people's safety is just as important as protecting the entrance doors themselves.
For those seeking additional safety and durability, laminated glass is the answer. Combining two sheets of tempered glass with an interlayer, typically made from Polyvinyl Butyral (PVB), results in a sturdy glass composite known as laminated safety glass. Using 6mm, 8mm, or 10mm thick laminated tempered glass (66.2, 88.2, or 1010.2 compositions respectively) for your canopy provides extra protection against impacts, shields from adverse weather conditions, precipitation, snow, and falling debris.
A canopy over the entrance is not just a practical structure designed to protect against precipitation and direct sunlight. Made of glass, they also lend a modern elegance to your entrance area.
The recommended width should be at least 40 to 50 centimeters wider than the entrance door frame and deep enough to cover the open door leaf, or at least 1000mm, to protect both the door and people. It is especially important to protect wooden exterior doors from precipitation and direct sunlight. For example, if the entrance door frame width is 1000mm, a canopy with glass dimensions of 1000-1100mm x 1500-1600mm would be very suitable.
Glass canopies can be installed regardless of whether your building facade is made of wood, insulated or not. Appropriate technical solutions must be chosen.
Installation methods can be divided into categories - hanging, under supported and fixed in profile
A very popular choice is hanging glass canopies, which require 80 to 100 centimeters of free space above the entrance for attachment to the wall. Hanging canopies can also be fixed on vertical profiles of glass facades. For this purpose, specific insert parts are used.
However, if there is a window in this area or not enough free space, the solution is to support the glass from below. Special supporting brackets can be used. These supports can be made of polished stainless steel or painted in any tone of the RAL color palette to match your windows, doors, or sills.
To achieve a truly minimalistic and modern look, consider another method of canopy installation, where one edge of the glass is fixed in a special aluminum profile attached to the facade. This creates the impression that the glass canopy is “floating” above the entrance, with almost invisible fixings. However, it is important to note that this method limits the size of the canopy - with two 10mm tempered laminated glasses, the maximum size from the wall to the outer edge of the glass is 1500mm. This type of glass fixing is also not convenient for insulated facades. For this method of glass fixing, it is advisable to prepare the intended attachment point in advance.
The two systems differ in several respects, and choosing between them is usually not a matter of taste but of what is physically possible on a given facade.
| Hanging | Supported | |
|---|---|---|
| What carries the canopy | Tension rods from the glass up to the wall | Brackets from below |
| Space above the opening | Free wall surface required | Almost none required |
| Load per connector | Lower – connection points further apart | Higher – connection points closer |
| Maximum depth | Beyond 1.3 m; further with a second row of rods | Around 1.3 m |
| When to choose it | Free wall above the door and a deeper canopy needed | A window or other obstacle sits above the door |
This is the first and biggest difference. A hanging canopy is held by tension rods that run from the glass up to the wall, so it needs free wall space above the opening – above the doors, for example. A supported canopy is carried by brackets from below, so it takes up considerably less space in height.
On a supported canopy the connection points sit closer together, which means the load on each connector is higher. On a hanging canopy the connection points are further apart, so the load carried by each connector is smaller.
Each system has its limits. With a supported canopy the maximum depth you can achieve is around 1.3 m. With a hanging canopy you can go deeper: if you decide to build a very deep canopy, you can place a second row of tension rods further out, which makes greater projections possible.
If a hanging canopy allows greater depths and lower loads on the connectors, it is fair to ask why the supported version is needed at all. Because quite often there is simply no space for the tension rods above the opening. There may be a window or some other obstacle directly above the doors, and the rods cannot be fixed there. In those cases the supported canopy is the solution.
Both systems are separate ranges in the catalogue: hanging glass canopies and under supported glass canopies.
It comes down to the loads applied to the canopy: the higher the loads, the closer together the connectors have to be placed. The rule of thumb we try to stick to has three limits:
The brackets are spaced 1200 mm apart, with 300 mm from each bracket to the edge of the glass, giving a total glass width of 1800 mm. The load width working on one bracket is half of the span between the brackets (600 mm) plus the overhang beyond it (300 mm), which comes to 900 mm – within the limit.
Here the distance between the brackets should not exceed 1000 mm. The middle bracket carries half of the span on each side of it – 500 mm plus 500 mm – so its load width is already 1000 mm, right at the limit. Unlike the outer brackets, the middle one gains nothing from the short overhang at the edge of the glass, so it is always the governing one.
It is worth correcting a common assumption. Many people think the weakest part of a glass canopy is the glass. Usually that is not true: the critical part is the connection itself. In many cases the load-bearing material – whether concrete, masonry, timber or another material – is hidden behind insulation. The load is therefore applied to the connector at an eccentricity from the load-bearing material, so the connector has to carry additional bending as well. For that reason the weakest element in the whole construction is usually neither the brackets nor the glass, but the way the canopy is connected to the wall.
Connector types differ depending on the load-bearing material that will carry the loads from the canopy.
Aerated concrete blocks, bricks or other masonry. Here the connection is made with a chemical anchor, and there are two cases.
Case 1 – the load-bearing material is directly accessible, with no insulation or cladding in front of it. In this case you can glue threaded rods straight into the load-bearing material. The threaded rods are usually M10 or M12.
Case 2 – there is insulation or a facade on top of the load-bearing material. Additional loads then act on the connector. Say we have 200 mm of insulation on a concrete wall: the load is applied at a 200 mm eccentricity from the load-bearing material, and this has to be taken into account. In this case we use connectors of a much larger diameter – stainless steel rods 20 mm in diameter and roughly 300 to 400 mm long, depending on the build-up – which are glued into the load-bearing material. Because the rod diameter is much larger, it can withstand the additional load from the eccentricity without excessive deflection, which could otherwise break the anchor or damage the facade.
If the load-bearing material is timber, we use special timber screws intended for fixing steel plates to timber.
Glass width runs from 1400 to 3500 mm in 18 steps, and depth is 900, 1000, 1100, 1200 or 1300 mm. For a supported canopy, 1300 mm is at the same time the structural maximum described above.
Bear in mind that the glass is manufactured specifically for each order – it comes in different thicknesses, colours, depths and widths, and two panes of the same width can still have different hole spacings. Glass manufacturing takes two to four weeks, depending on how busy our suppliers are, and shipping has to be added on top of that. In some cases the total can reach about five weeks.
See the full range under glass canopies. If you need something outside this range, email info@strofix.com and we will tell you what is possible.
The recommended width is at least 40 to 50 cm wider than the door opening, and the depth should cover an open door leaf or be at least 1000 mm. The catalogue offers depths of 900, 1000, 1100, 1200 and 1300 mm; for a supported canopy 1300 mm is also the structural maximum.
It depends on the loads. The rule of thumb has three limits: the load width carried by one bracket should not exceed 1000 mm, the distance between two brackets should not exceed 1200 mm, and the distance from the outermost bracket to the edge of the glass should not exceed 325 mm.
When insulation sits on top of the load-bearing material, the load is applied at an eccentricity, so we use stainless steel rods 20 mm in diameter and 300 to 400 mm long, glued into the load-bearing material with a chemical anchor. With direct access, M10 or M12 threaded rods are enough.
A hanging canopy is held by tension rods running from the glass up to the wall, so it needs free wall space above the opening but can reach greater depths. A supported canopy is carried by brackets from below, takes up less height, and its maximum depth is around 1.3 m.
Last updated: 2026-08-17 · Juris Rubenis, Strofix
A glass canopy is more than just a shield against the weather! It is an expressive design element that reflects your attention to detail and quality.
With a combination like tempered, laminated glass and stainless steel fixtures, you can be confident that your entrance will not only be well protected, but also exude elegance and modernity. It's an investment in both functionality and appeal.
