Crafting Australia's best facades

Louvreclad has been helping leading architects, builders, and developers create some of Australia's most iconic buildings and precincts for over three decades.

Specialising in the design, engineering, supply and installation of louvre screens and bespoke façade solutions, Louvreclad services the commercial, public, education, government and multi-residential sectors.

The firm's remarkable building exteriors use innovative architectural louvre solutions to help achieve comfortable, healthy, safe and energy-efficient working and living environments.

The Queensland-based business is widely recognised for setting new benchmarks for effective and sustainable façade and louvre designs and solutions for the Australian construction industry.

Founded and run by the Wright family, Louvreclad has headquarters in Ipswich and project teams in Victoria and New South Wales. The business designs, engineers and fabricates everything in-house; its products are 100 per cent Australian-made.

"Aluminium is an ideal match for louvre and façade manufacture," says Louvreclad design consultant Uddhava Sharplin.

"It's one of the most sustainable building materials and is incredibly corrosion resistant.

"We can often design out a support structure specified in steel and replace it with aluminium. It has great strength if designed and engineered properly."

Uddhava also notes aluminium is a lot easier to work with than steel: "you can extrude, laser cut, and perforate it. You can't do that with steel."

Louvreclad has created solutions for significant construction projects, including Canberra's Landmark Constitution Place, The Standard Apartments and the Gabba in Brisbane, and Sound Stage 6 in Melbourne's Docklands. What sets Louvreclad apart is its capacity to engage from early project design and develop bespoke solutions.

"We have an amazing team of designers, engineers and façade specialists who understand how to integrate louvres and screens onto buildings. We often work with project architects from the early design stage and provide engineering advice to ensure projects run smoothly."

The team draws on an extensive library of exclusive and standard aluminium extrusions to design and engineer bespoke solutions to meet design intent and requirements for airflow, wind pressure, rain protection, solar shading and connections.

For Constitution Place, the Louvreclad team needed to meet unique wind and rain defence requirements and kept returning to the drawing board to develop, test and refine a solution. Their persistence paid off in creating an entirely new louvre profile, the Altura Series® 145, which delivered Class B 98 per cent effective rain defence and Class 1 aerodynamics. Louvreclad's high-performance black vertical louvres were integrated and articulated the building as two stacked volumes.

Louvreclad's design and engineering, sales, estimation, and fabrication teams work closely and share satisfaction in the firm's achievements. A digital display on the fabrication floor showcases projects completed with Louvreclad's ingenuity.

Capral Aluminium has been Louvreclad's supply partner for more than 20 years; the two businesses are neighbours, providing extra convenience to deliveries and collaboration on extrusion developments.

"Working on bespoke projects where we need to create something new, it's easy to share drawings with Capral's design team, and they quickly let us know if our designs will work and advise on lead times. It works very well for our business," Uddhava says.

Adeline Wright from Louvreclad's procurement team confirms the strength of the partnership and the importance of Capral's support.

"We require a very high quality of aluminium because our products are used on building facades. Capral packages our extrusions very carefully in stillages to avoid any damage."

She recently toured the Capral plant and was able to see the extrusion process and visit the die workshop to see how Louvreclad’s extrusions were created from design to final product.

Adeline underlines the fact that with Capral's aluminium being manufactured locally, means quicker turnarounds and fewer project hold-ups for Louvreclad customers.

"When covid disrupted global supply chains, we were very grateful to entirely source and make in Australia," Adeline says.

Like everyone on the Louvreclad team, Adeline takes great delight in walking or driving past one of their projects.

“It’s incredible to know that we played our part in creating these extraordinary buildings.”