Black
Lewes
Walk-in
Shower Screens
For Wet Rooms & Trays
A shower you walk into, with no door in the way. One panel or several, standing on the floor rather than on a bath.
One Panel — Full Height
Wet Room, Tray or Plinth
Level Access
L-Shape or Free-Standing
Full-Height — No Bar Needed
A walk-in screen is the simplest shower we make and the one with the most variations. It stands on whatever your floor is — a tray, a tiled or micro cement wet-room floor, a level-access floor, a half-wall or a plinth — and it stops the water without ever getting in your way. We make them in our own workshop to your measurements, and we survey, build and install every one ourselves, UK-wide. Start with the floor: it decides more than the glass does.
Call 0333 090 8736
Monday-Friday 7.30AM-4PM
Survey, Design & Installation are included
What makes it a walk-in
Two things, and both are simple. There is no door, so nothing opens and nothing is in the way. And it stands on the floor — a tray, a tiled floor, a half-wall, whatever your bathroom has — rather than on the edge of a bath. Glass that sits on a bath is a bath screen, or a bath shower screen, and it is a different product with its own rules; this page is everything at floor level. Beyond those two, the rest of the page is variations. People arrive here having searched three different names for the same family, so it is worth saying plainly how they relate.
The family
Walk-in shower screen
The name for all of it. A panel, or several, that separate the shower from the room and leave the opening free. No door to pull, no door seals to replace, no hinge to fail. It is the least complicated shower we build and the one that suits the most bathrooms.
The floor
Wet room shower screen
Wet room describes the floor, not the glass. It means there is no visible tray: the floor is a tanked surface built to take water — tiled, Tadelakt, micro cement, anything properly sealed. So every wet-room screen is a walk-in screen. It does not work the other way round: a wet room can just as easily have an enclosure or a door.
The panel
Walk-in glass panel
The glass itself. Almost every walk-in panel is fixed — set in place and staying there — which is why there are no hinges, no door seals and almost nothing to maintain. Fixed, hinged and folding are the three ways any screen is built, on a floor or on a bath, and our page on glass shower screens sets them side by side.
A shower tray or a wet room
Start with what the shower floor is, because there are only two answers and they are opposites. A tray is a finished piece you stand on, with the fall and the drain built in. A wet room is finished in the room’s own surface: the base is tanked, then tiled, plastered or micro-cemented over, so no tray shows. One cannot be the other. How high either one sits against the bathroom floor is a separate question, and the next section takes it.
Shower tray
A tray, with the drain built in
Ready-made, or made to size for an awkward space, a tray arrives formed with the fall and the waste already in it, and the glass stands on its edge. The fall is built in at the factory rather than shaped by hand on site, so it does not depend on how the floor is laid. That is why a tray is the simplest and the cheapest base, faster to fit and easier to put right if the room ever changes.
Wet room
A wet room, finished for the room
No visible tray. Underneath there is usually a wet room tray, also called a floor former: a load-bearing base with the slope and the drain outlet already built in, which makes it simpler to seal. It is tanked, then tiled or finished over in Tadelakt, micro cement or stone, whatever suits the room. It is the most expensive base and the best looking, because the shower stops being a thing sitting in the bathroom and becomes part of it.
How high your shower floor sits
Tray or wet room, the next question is height: where the shower floor sits against the bathroom floor. Most showers now are level access, with no step at all, and most of those are wet rooms. But a tray can sit on top of the floor, a low upstand can run round the edge, the whole floor can be raised when the drain needs depth, or the base can rise to a half-wall. The glass is the same; what it stands on changes.
Open any one below and the picture changes to match it.
No step at all: the shower floor carries straight on from the bathroom floor, and it is how most showers are planned now. Mostly it is a wet-room floor, but a tray can be set flush into the floor to the same effect. It is also what anyone who needs wheelchair access will ask for. We build the glass for it; the floor and the fittings around it are not our trade.
The simplest way to fit a tray: it sits on top of the finished bathroom floor, so the shower stands the height of the tray above the room, with a small step at the entry. Nothing is cut into the floor to take it. The glass stands on the edge of the tray, the same as on any other tray.
The two floors stay level, and a low step runs round the edge of the shower, usually 50 to 100 mm high and as deep, though people build them to different sizes. The glass stands right on top. It stops water on the shower floor from crossing, but water running down the glass lands on its flat top, so it does little for that. When it is shaped like a frame on the floor, architects call it a plinth.
Here the whole shower floor is lifted, usually because there is not enough depth below it for the drain to fall properly. Raising it gives the waste the room it needs. As a wet room it is tanked and finished like any other, often in the same stone as the bathroom, just higher. It can be a tray as well: a raised tray is still a tray, and a raised wet room is still a wet room.
A dwarf wall, usually built at around waist height, carries the glass. Sometimes the panel sits on the wall across its full width; sometimes it is partly on the wall and partly carried down to the floor, with the wall recessed so it reads as part of the screen. It is the base to choose when you want the lower part of the shower solid, with nothing seen through it, so it feels like a wall.
Wet room shower screens
A wet room is a walk-in taken one step further. There is no visible tray: the shower floor, usually laid over a wet room tray or floor former, is tanked, finished in tile, stone or micro cement, and falls to a drain. The finish can match the bathroom or differ from it — what defines a wet room is that, at the opening, it usually meets the bathroom floor level, with no step. That makes it one way to get a level access shower; a tray set flush into the floor is the other. Either way, how the glass meets the floor matters.
Two ways to set the glass into a wet room floor
One looks the cleanest and takes the most planning; the other is simpler and easier to live with. Both work well — but the choice has to be made before the floor is laid.
01 · Recessed into the floor
Planned before the floor is laid. The glass sits partly down in the floor, held in one of two ways: a U-channel fitted flush with the surface, showing a thin 2 mm edge beside the glass, or a groove cut into the stone that the glass is glued into, leaving only a colour-matched mastic line. Either way the glass rises straight out of the level floor. It takes the most organising — the tanking, the stone and the glass must go in the right order.
02 · Why it takes more planning
It brings knock-on difficulties that need working out between the trades in advance. A screen that does not go up to the ceiling, for example, can mean leaving the top tile above the wall profile off until the glass is in. All of it is solvable — it simply has to be decided early rather than discovered on the day.
03 · On the finished floor
The floor is laid and finished first. The channel goes into the wall, or a groove is left there for it, and the glass slides into it standing 2–3 mm above the floor. The gap underneath is then sealed with silicone: a 2–3 mm line that is hardly noticeable once it is done.
04 · Why it is easier
The tanking is simpler, the trades do not have to work around one another, and if a panel ever needs replacing it comes out without risking the tiles around it. Whichever way you go, a wet-room floor has to be well planned — so tell us which you have in mind before your tiler starts.
How much do you want it to surround you?
A walk-in can be a single sheet of glass, or it can wrap most of the way around the shower. What it never has is a door. That is not a limit on what we can build. People often ask for a walk-in shower with a door, and we make those too — but the moment a door goes in, it stops being a walk-in. You will see it sold as a shower screen with a door; it is really an enclosure: see our shower enclosures. How far a walk-in wraps is up to your room — the width of the opening, how far the water reaches, and how much floor you are happy to give to the shower. Here are the three simplest shapes.
A single panel
The classic walk-in, and the one most people picture. One sheet of glass comes off the wall beside the shower head and stops the spray reaching the room, with the whole entry left open. It is the cheapest, the fastest to fit and the easiest to keep clean, because there is nothing on it but glass. Its limit is width. Once a panel gets wide it needs steadying, either with a bar across the top or by making it a full-height shower screen — taken right up to the ceiling, which holds it with no bar at all.
An L-shape
Two panels, not one. The main screen does most of the separating, and where that is not enough we add a smaller return and bond the two together at the corner. The bond is structural rather than cosmetic: joined, the panels brace each other, and that is usually what removes the need for a bar across the top. It also catches the water that a single panel lets past at the open end.
A corner entry
One panel off one wall, another off the wall opposite, and the gap between them is the way in. Often called a corner walk-in shower, because you step in through the corner itself. It divides the room rather than enclosing the shower, and it suits a bathroom with enough space that a door would only be in the way. The same idea as a large pentagon shower, with the door simply left out because nothing needs closing.
Walk-in shower enclosures — enclosed, but no door
The name contradicts itself. A walk-in means you walk straight in, with no door to stop and open. An enclosure means the shower is closed in — and closing it in takes a door. Put the two words together and you get the middle ground the term really describes: glass on two or more sides, with the door left out. In other words it is a multi-panel shower screen, which is why it belongs here with everything else that is doorless.
Corner, entry between panels
The usual layout: a corner, two screens and a gap. Most walk-in enclosures sit in a corner between two tiled walls. From one wall comes a screen with a short return turned at 90° on its end, so the two form an L and brace each other. From the other wall comes a second fixed panel, running parallel to that return with a gap of about 600 mm between them. The gap is the way in, and the return keeps the spray from reaching it.
Off the shelf, or made to fit. Most of these are sold as kits, built to a standard size and down to a price. We make them bespoke: cut to the exact tray or wet-room floor you actually have rather than the nearest stock size, and built to a better quality than a mass-produced kit. The layout is the same; the fit and the finish are not.
Or the way in beside the wall. The other version is the one on the right. The glass wraps two or three sides and the opening is left beside a wall instead of between panels. It works when the room is generous and the shower head sits on that same wall, angled across at you, so the water travels away from the opening. Not the traditional shape, but one clients design and ask for. In a small room either version needs a door, and a walk-in shower with a door is really a shower enclosure.
Entry beside the wall
Free-standing shower screens
Free-standing means no wall holds it up. The glass stands out in the room on its own, dividing the shower from the rest of the bathroom, and you walk in from either end. That is the whole point of it: one room split down the middle, with a way in on both sides. It also makes these some of the largest screens we build — with two open ends, each one needs enough glass past the shower head to keep the water in.
What actually holds it up
- ✓Never the floor alone. A two-metre panel held only at the floor would need glass far thicker than any shower uses, or many layers laminated together, set some 200 mm or more down into the floor.
- ✓So the top is always held. The frame, or the glass itself, runs up and fixes into the ceiling.
- ✓Or bars run back at 90° to the wall behind, the one the screen sits parallel to.
- ✓In the picture, the side frames carry on up to the ceiling and work as posts.
- ✓Two heads and two sets of controls on that back wall, so each side works on its own.
Two people can shower at once without getting in each other’s way, and each has their own way in and out — a true double walk-in shower. It needs a generous room, but where there is one, it is the most useful layout on this page.
Curved walk-in shower screens
A curved screen follows a bow instead of cutting straight across the shower, and the curve is more than an unusual look — it does real work. A flat panel is a thin sheet that flexes. Bend the same glass and it stiffens itself — much the way two panels bonded into an L brace each other — so a curved walk-in needs far less help at the top than a flat one of the same size. The top edge is open to the same thinking: we cut arched screens too, and there is one further down this page.
CURVED
GIRTH
HEIGHT
Bent, toughened, and true to the curve
The glass is heated, bent to one continuous radius and toughened in the same process, so it is full-strength safety glass like any flat panel. The tightest it can go is a radius of around 450 mm, or around 500 mm on panels taller than 2.4 metres. A curve a few millimetres out shows against the floor channel, so ours come from a specialist plant chosen for curves that are true and clear to look through, to a radius settled at our survey.
What a curve cannot do
A flat section running into a curve, all in one toughened panel, is not something anyone makes as a one-off — that shape only exists in mass production, which is why it turns up in mass-market curved bath screens and nowhere bespoke. And we never laminate curved glass for a frameless screen: water reaches the edges and it delaminates. So it is one continuous curve, or flat panels joined at an angle.
How small can a walk-in shower be?
A walk-in has one way of going wrong: water finds the open end. How far it travels depends on the shower — where the head points, any body jets, the pressure — and on you, because much of it bounces off you before it lands. Get these four right and the floor stays dry without a door.
01 · The panel
Around 900 mm is the working minimum
That is the width we would want on a single panel before we stopped worrying about the open end — a working figure from our installs, not a standard. Almost every walk-in panel also needs holding at the top. Exactly where a panel starts to wobble depends on how firmly it can be fixed to the wall and floor, but nearly all screens are wider than 600 mm, which puts them well inside that range. The ways of holding it are further down the page.
02 · The shower
Where the water is aimed changes the answer
A big rain head in the ceiling drops water more or less straight down, so the panel has an easy job. A head angled out from the wall throws towards the opening, and side body jets or a powerful shower push water sideways whoever is standing there. Tell us what is going on the wall before the screen is sized — the same width behaves completely differently.
03 · You
Most of the water lands within about 40 cm of you
The water that reaches the floor mostly comes off you, not straight off the head. It hits your head and shoulders and splashes outwards, and as your hands move, it runs along your arms and carries further. In most showers the bulk of it lands within about 40 cm of where you stand — that ring is what the screen has to cover.
04 · The honest answer
Under about 800 mm, change the shape
If the opening will not give you the width, more glass in a straight line will not fix it. An L-shape catches what a single panel lets past, a flipper angles the last part inwards, and sometimes the right answer is a door — and then you want a shower enclosure, not a walk-in. We usually tell you at the enquiry stage, from the photos or plans we ask for to quote properly.
Can a walk-in panel move?
The other question a walk-in asks is whether any of it moves. Nearly always the answer is no, and that is all the word fixed means — a panel, or several, that stand where they are put. Two variations move a little, on a tray or a wet-room floor alike: a folding screen, which is closer to a bifold shower door than to a screen, and a flipper, which is a small deflector you can angle in and fold back out of the way.
FIXED SCREENS
01
Moves:Nothing
Advantage:Simplest, Lowest Price
Best For:Almost Every Walk-in
FOLDING SCREENS
02
Moves:Folds Away
Advantage:Gives Space Back
Best For:Tight Layouts
FLIPPER PANELS
03
Moves:Pivots Inwards
Advantage:Extra Splash Cover
Best For:A Screen Too Short
What holds a walk-in screen up
Most walk-in panels are fixed on two sides: the floor and the wall. The other two sides are free, and glass flexes. So the corner furthest from the wall and floor — the top of the open edge — moves. Without support, that movement works into the joint at the floor, which can crack and leak. So that corner needs holding still. Here are five ways to do it, best first. The support bar you see in every showroom is only the third.
Open any one below to see it.
The most secure of the lot, and it needs no bar at all — this is what a full-height shower screen actually is. Either a channel is let into the ceiling and the panel slotted into it and glued, or the panel stops 2–3 mm short and that gap is sealed to the ceiling. It also tends to look better than any bar: the glass reads as part of the room rather than as something propped up in it.
Turn the panel into an L-shape and the problem goes away. A small return bonded to the main screen braces it, and the two hold each other steady — the same joint described further up the page, doing structural work rather than shaping the shower. It stops the wobble and catches the water a single panel lets past, which is why we suggest it before any bar.
If the glass cannot reach the ceiling and an L-shape does not suit the room, this is the best support arm there is: a tube running square from the screen to the wall opposite, fixed at both ends and sitting above the opening. Bolted into that wall, it holds like a threaded rod, so the glass is kept properly still — the safest way to steady a panel with a bar.
Sometimes the wall opposite cannot be used. You may not want a bar running across above the shower, or the tiling on that wall would leave the fixing sitting badly. Then the tube runs back at 45° instead, from the middle of the panel's top edge to the wall the screen comes off, making a triangle. A tighter 22.5° brings the fixing closer to the glass — some rooms need that, though it does not suit every finish.
A short vertical tube from the top of the glass up to the ceiling. It is the weakest of the five from the start, because it is not a solid post: it is three fittings joined together, gripping the glass at one end and the ceiling at the other, and every joint allows a little play. Even 100 mm long it moves slightly — roughly 2 mm either way — and at 300 mm nearer 10 mm. Beyond that, take the glass up to the ceiling instead.
Walk-in showers with a bench or seat
A bench is one of the most popular things to add to a walk-in — for anyone who likes to take their time in the shower rather than rush, and for older people it can be a support and a more comfortable way to shower. We should be straight about one thing: we do not build or tile benches. Your builder or tiler makes the bench, and we fit the glass to it. There are two kinds, and they change the glass in quite different ways.
TILED BENCH
A floating bench: the glass stays simple
Built into the wall like a floating step and tiled on every face — top, underside and both ends. It usually sits in the corner inside the shower, tied into two walls, and stops about 50 mm short of the glass. Because it never touches the screen, the screen is just a plain rectangular panel. Nothing stands on the floor, so it works over an ordinary tray as well as on a tiled or micro cement floor.
A bench from the floor: the glass goes round it
Tiled up from the floor itself, usually on a wet-room floor, with nothing hollow underneath — which makes it the sturdier kind. These mostly run the full depth of the shower, right to where the glass stands. So instead of stopping short, the glass goes round the bench: we cut a large shaped opening in the panel where the bench sits, and the screen wraps it.
Talk to us before the bench is built
If the glass has to meet the bench, there is more than one way to do it: the panel can be cut round the tiled bench, or set into the tiling so the bench wraps the glass. That is worth deciding before anything is tiled. Even a floating bench matters in a small bathroom — a full-height panel has to be turned upright inside the room to go in, and a bench in the wrong place can stand in its way.
Where the water goes
A walk-in is more sensitive to water than a shower with a door. A door has seals, and a threshold strip about 10 mm high underneath it, so a little water at the opening is held back. A walk-in has nothing there. Even a small amount that reaches the open end goes straight onto the bathroom floor — usually level — and travels across it fast. So if you want a walk-in, plan to keep the water from reaching the opening at all. These three things help.
The fall is the second barrier
The floor has to run to the drain firmly enough that water is heading away from the opening the whole time it is on the floor. In practice that means more than about 10 mm of fall over a metre — typically more, and the right figure depends on how big the shower is and how it is laid out. More fall is safer, and there is no version of this where too little is fine.
And it tells you when the drain is blocking
Hair and soap residue block every shower drain eventually. When yours starts to go, water stops leaving as fast as it arrives and begins to stand — and then you move, and your own movement pushes that standing water towards the open side. A generous fall makes it obvious weeks early: you see water sitting where it never sits. A flat floor tells you nothing until the bathroom floor is wet.
A tray has already answered this
A tray arrives with the fall and the waste already formed in it at the factory, and its raised edge holds back anything that gets loose. That is the practical case for a tray, and it has nothing to do with looks. A wet-room floor looks better — the same tiles or micro cement run through the whole bathroom — but its fall is shaped by hand on site, so it is only as good as the tiler who lays it.
A walk-in, or a door: at a glance
Everything above in one place. The comparison that decides this is not framed against frameless — we set out framed and frameless shower screens on a page of their own — but whether there is a door at all. Read across a row. Most people find two or three of them matter and the rest do not, and which two or three is a fact about your bathroom rather than about your taste.
| Compare | Walk-in, no door | With a door |
|---|---|---|
| Getting in | Walk-in, no door Nothing to open, nothing to walk around, nothing to pull towards you in a tight space. You step in. It is the whole point of the thing and no door arrangement matches it. | With a door A door has to swing, slide or fold, and it needs the room to do it. On a good layout you never notice. On a tight one you notice every day. |
| Water at the open end | Walk-in, no door Controlled by width, by where the shower head points and by the fall of the floor. Get those right and it stays dry. Get them wrong and there is nothing to catch it. | With a door Contained by the door. Water that gets loose inside stays inside until it drains, which is a real advantage and the main reason to fit one. |
| A small bathroom | Walk-in, no door Usually the wrong choice. Under about 800 mm of screen the honest answer is a different shape or a door — an L-shape or a flipper panel will stretch it a little, not rescue it. | With a door Usually the right choice. A bifold or a hinged door closes a narrow opening in a room that has no width to give away. |
| A bar above the glass | Walk-in, no door Hard to avoid. Unless the glass goes up to the ceiling or turns a corner, a walk-in panel needs a reinforcement bar to hold its free corner, and most walk-ins have one. The options are further up the page. | With a door Often not needed. The door takes up a large part of the opening, so the fixed panels beside it are smaller — and if they are planned properly, they can do without a bar above. |
| The floor | Walk-in, no door Does more of the work, so it matters more. The fall to the drain is part of how the shower contains water rather than a plumbing detail, and a blocked drain shows up on the bathroom floor. | With a door The tray upstand or the threshold holds a pooling floor for you. You get away with more. |
| Cost | Walk-in, no door The least expensive glass shower we build. No hinges, no handle, no door processing — usually a rectangular panel and its fixings, and the price follows. | With a door Dearer, in proportion to the hardware and the extra glass processing. A door is the single most worked-on part of any shower. |
Walk-in screens in real bathrooms
Every picture is a Caledora installation — surveyed, designed, made in our workshop and fitted by our own team. Trays and wet-room floors, single panels, L-shapes and curved glass, clear, fluted and black grid, across the UK.
How much metal shows
Most walk-in screens we build are meant to show as little metal as possible, so the fixing people choose most often is the one with none at all: the glass set into a recess in the wall. When the metal is meant to be seen, three finishes are asked for far more than any other — black, brass and nickel — but we make any metal finish, so it can be matched to the taps or to anything else in the room.
Open any one below to see it.
The glass runs into a groove cut in the wall — and often the ceiling too — and is sealed with a mastic matched to the tiles, so there are no brackets and no channel to see. It is the most popular way we fit a walk-in, because it leaves nothing but glass.
A slim black frame, black brackets or channels, or a full black grid with the glass divided into panes — the grid is something we build often. Our black walk-in shower screens run from a single dark line to a full industrial-style grid.
Brushed, polished or antique brass on a slim frame, the channel or the bar above the glass — often chosen to match the taps, so the screen reads as part of the same set of fittings.
Polished nickel on the same parts — the third finish people ask for most, and only one of many: whatever the metal in the rest of the bathroom, we can make the fixings to match it.
How a walk-in screen is built and fitted
Two stages, and one condition that has to be met before any of them start. A walk-in is the simplest thing we make and it has the shortest installation of anything in our range — but only because almost all of the work happens before we arrive, and some of it is not ours to do.
Sequence
The floor has to be finished before we can measure
We measure the room as it will finally be, so the tiling, the fall and the grout all have to be complete before we survey. The glass is cut to the walls and the floor exactly as they are, and anything that changes afterwards changes the fit. A U-channel or a wall recess gives us a little tolerance to adjust on the day.
Critical: surface-mounted wall brackets leave almost no tolerance. The mastic seal beside the glass has to be thin and accurate, so with brackets the room really must be finished first.
Stage-01
Made to those measurements
Walls, floors and ceilings are rarely perfectly plumb or level, so a walk-in that looks like a plain rectangle usually is not one. We measure every panel to the room, and most end up with rakes — edges cut at a slight angle to follow the floor or the wall. Like all our bespoke shower screens, the glass is then cut and toughened to those sizes, so nothing needs a thick mastic line and no panel sits out of true.
Why the survey matters: toughened glass cannot be cut, drilled or trimmed afterwards. Everything is final once we have measured.
Stage-02
Fitted, usually in a morning
This is the shortest install we do. There is no door to hang, no hinge to set, no seal to align and nothing to come back and adjust once the silicone has gone off. Fixings are set, the panel is positioned and levelled, the support is fixed if there is one, and the floor joint is sealed. The last step is an easy-clean coating on the shower side of the glass, included as standard. Every job is different, but a single walk-in screen is often finished before lunch.
Which walk-in is right for your bathroom?
Six situations that come up at nearly every survey, and what we would actually say to you about each one. Budget aside — that decides plenty on its own — this is what the room itself is telling you.
You have got the room
Build a large walk-in shower: a walk-in enclosure, glass on three sides and no door. Once the opening is far enough from the shower head that spray never reaches it, a door adds nothing but something to walk around. This is the version most people picture when they imagine a hotel bathroom, and it needs space rather than money.
The bathroom is small
Under about 800 mm of screen, more glass in a straight line will not save it. An L-shape or a flipper panel will stretch it a little. Past that the right answer is a door, and we would tell you so — a walk-in fitted into a room that cannot carry it just puts water on your bathroom floor every morning.
You are laying a wet-room floor anyway
Then take the glass all the way to the ceiling. A tanked floor already makes the shower part of the room rather than an object standing in it, and a panel that stops short with a bar across the top undoes that in one line. Full-height is also the strongest way to hold a walk-in panel, so you get the better answer twice.
You want the light to keep going
A half-wall. Glass from about waist height upward lets daylight run straight across the room while the masonry below does the containing, and it gives you somewhere to stand a bottle. It suits a bathroom with one window doing all the work, and it is the base people are most surprised by once they see it built.
Two of you shower
A free-standing panel down the middle, two heads on the back wall and two sets of controls. Each of you gets a side, your own temperature and your own way in and out, and nobody is edging past anybody. It needs a generous room, and where there is one it is the most useful thing on this page.
You do not want a bar above the glass
Then do not have one. Either the panel goes up to the ceiling, or it turns a short corner and braces itself. Both are better structurally than any bar and both are invisible. A bar is what we fit when the ceiling is out of reach and the room will not take a return — it is the third answer, not the first.
Walk-in showers we have built
A few of the doorless showers we have designed and fitted — on trays, on tiled and micro cement wet-room floors, single panels through to three-sided walk-ins. Each one measured for a specific bathroom; click through for full photographs, hardware and notes on how it was built.
Chrome
London
Wall recessed
London
Wall recessed
London
Walk-in shower screen questions
What is a walk-in shower screen?
A panel of glass, or several, that separates the shower from the rest of the bathroom and leaves the way in completely open. There is no door. The test is simply whether you walk in without opening anything — if you do, it is a walk-in, however many panels there are. The second half of the definition is where it stands: on the floor, whether that floor is a tray, a tiled or micro cement wet-room floor, or a raised plinth. Glass that sits on a bath is a bath screen instead.
What is the difference between a walk-in screen and a wet room screen?
Mostly the words describe two different things rather than two different products. Walk-in describes the glass — no door. Wet room describes the floor: an area that is tanked and finished to have water on it constantly, tiled, Tadelakt, micro cement or any other properly waterproofed surface, with no visible tray. So a wet room can have a screen, a door or a full enclosure, but any wet-room screen is a walk-in screen, which is why both live on this page. One thing worth correcting while we are here: almost everyone states that a wet room is level with the bathroom floor. Mostly it is, and shares the bathroom floor with a fall back to the drain. But we have built wet rooms with an upstand along the front and fixed glass standing on it, properly tanked and finished in Tadelakt inside. It is still a wet room.
How wide does a walk-in shower screen need to be?
Around 900 mm is the width we would want on a single panel before we stopped worrying about the open end. That is a working minimum from our own installs rather than a standard or a rule, and the right answer for your bathroom depends on two other things. The first is where the water is aimed: a big rain head in the ceiling drops water more or less straight down, while a head angled out from the wall throws it towards the opening. The second is you. Much of the water that reaches a bathroom floor bounces off the person — off the head and shoulders, and along the arms as your hands move — and in most showers the bulk of it lands within about 40 cm of where you stand. Body jets and powerful showers throw it further. Below about 800 mm we would suggest an L-shape, a flipper panel, or a door.
Does a walk-in shower screen need a bar across the top?
Often, but it is the third-best answer rather than the first. A typical walk-in panel is around two metres tall and nine hundred wide, held at one edge and free at the top, and wide frameless glass left like that has a little give in it — which is what breaks the floor seals over the years. There are five ways to steady it and two of them are invisible. Best is taking the glass to the ceiling, either slotted into a channel or sealed to it with a small gap, which is what a full-height shower screen actually is. Next best is turning the panel into an L-shape, where a short bonded return braces the main panel. After those come a bar running square from the screen to the opposite wall, then an angled bar at 45 or 22.5 degrees, and last a short vertical tube up to the ceiling, which only works within about 300 mm.
Is a walk-in shower colder than one with a door?
Yes, and it is the one genuine drawback. It is open, so it never traps heat and steam the way a closed shower does, and in a cold bathroom you notice. Worth weighing before anything else on this page if your bathroom runs chilly or the heating is poor. The same openness is also its best practical feature: air moves through constantly, so it dries on its own between showers and there is far less for mould to work with than in a closed enclosure, where the seals — the bottom seal especially — are where it starts. It is also the cheapest glass shower we build, because there are no hinges, no handle and no door processing — usually a rectangular panel and its fixings.
Can a walk-in shower have a door?
It can, and we build them — but the moment a door goes in, it stops being a walk-in. The glass becomes an enclosure, which is why you will see the same thing sold both as a walk-in shower with a door and as a shower enclosure. Which door depends on the room. For a walk-in shower with a sliding door, the door runs along the glass and needs no space to swing, but it wants a wider shower — around 1200 mm is good. A hinged door works on an 800 or 1000 mm tray, because the fixed panel beside it simply gets smaller and the door takes most of the water. A bifold folds back on itself, for a narrow opening with little room in front of it. And if the room has the width, think about leaving the door out altogether — that is what the rest of this page is about.
How much does a walk-in shower screen cost?
We do not publish exact prices, because every job is priced individually and plenty of things raise or lower the figure: the size of the glass, the shape — one panel, an L-shape, three sides or free-standing — the glass itself, how the panel is held still, the floor it stands on, and how far the job is from us. A screen recessed into a wet-room floor, for instance, is more work than one standing on the finished floor. What you can see is a price range. Every finished project on our site carries a band from £ to £££££, and our projects page can be filtered by price range, so the quickest route to a realistic figure is to find a design you like and look at its band. Our quote covers the glass: survey, design, manufacture and installation. The tray, tiling and plumbing come from your builder. Of everything we make, a walk-in is the least expensive glass shower, because there is no door.
Tell us what your floor is going to be
Send us the room — measurements if you have them, photographs if you do not, and two things in particular: what the shower floor will be (tray, tiled, micro cement, level or a plinth) and where the shower head is going. Those two settle most of this page. We will tell you what we would build and why, including if we think your bathroom wants a door instead, and quote the whole thing: survey, design, manufacture and installation.
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