Smart Glass French Doors in Burbank

Project Overview

These smart glass French doors in Burbank sit in the middle of a family home rather than at the edge of it. The room behind them is a home office, and it has glass on two sides — a pair of full-lite French doors opening to the dining room, and a single glazed door through to the kitchen. That is why the room is bright, and why it was the least private room in the house: two doors, three panes, and a clear line of sight from the busiest parts of the house. In 2026, Smart View retrofitted switchable smart glass film (PDLC) onto both sets of existing door glass — 29 sq ft in total — so every pane turns from crystal clear to solid frosted on a handheld remote, without a door coming off its hinges or a piece of glass being replaced.

Inside the Burbank Build

• 29 sq ft of switchable smart glass across two openings — the paired French doors and the kitchen door
• Applied to the existing glass: three full-height panes, each film panel cut to its own frame
• Clear-to-frosted control on a handheld remote — both doors switch together, with no new switch plate cut into the finished walls
• Even, milky-white frost from stile to stile; switched clear, the view through to the kitchen reads as sharply as it did through untouched glass
• Both doors still swing, latch and take daily traffic — nothing added to the handles, hinges or jambs
• Worked on the doors where they hang, in a finished and lived-in room

The Problem: An Office You Can See Into From Two Rooms

An interior room with glazed doors on two walls borrows light from the whole house, which is exactly what makes it a good place to work. It also puts the desk on display. The dining room and the kitchen are the two rooms a household moves through all day, and both look straight in at it. On a call, everyone crossing to the kitchen is in the frame; in the evening, it is the room nobody can settle in, because it never really closes.

The usual fixes each take something away. Café curtains on French door panes mean a rod at both ends of every pane, fabric that swings with the door and a dust catcher in a room full of screens. Adhesive frost or an etched pane solves privacy once and permanently — and the reason a house has glazed interior doors is the light and the sightline, including telling at a glance whether the office is occupied.

A retrofit avoided the trade entirely. Smart glass film is a thin PDLC (polymer-dispersed liquid crystal) layer bonded to the glass that is already hanging in the door. With power on, the crystals line up and the pane is clear; with power off, they scatter and the glass reads as a solid, even frost that shapes do not carry through — someone on the far side is a soft shadow at most. Light still passes, so frosting the doors does not darken the office; it stops being see-through, not bright. And because the film goes onto the panes already in the frames, no doors were ordered and no openings were disturbed.

Clear for the House, Frosted for the Desk

Most of the day the doors live clear, and the office keeps its light and its connection to the rest of the house. When the room needs to close — a call, a deadline, an hour where it has to be its own room — one press on the remote frosts the French doors and the kitchen door together, and from the dining side the openings read as quiet white panels. Another press brings the house back. Control sits on the desk rather than on a wall, which suits a room where the person switching the glass is already sitting down. It is the same on-demand privacy we built into a set of switchable French doors in Los Angeles — there dividing rooms in a larger home, here giving one working room a door it can actually shut. Film on the existing panes or new switchable glazing in the door: both routes are on our smart glass French doors page.

Working with Smart View

Every Smart View project starts with a measurement and a written proposal, so you see the smart glass cost before anything is ordered — a single small window usually starts around $1,500 fully installed and scales from there with the glass area, so a two-door run like this one is priced off the actual panes. If you have French doors, an interior office or a kitchen doorway you would rather switch than cover, send photos and dimensions and we will come back within one to two business days — backed by our 1-year warranty (CA license #1134029). Request your estimate or call (866) 728-9888.