Reverse Printed Glass Splashbacks for Dubai Hotel Apartments
A confidential hotel apartment development in Dubai needed kitchen splashbacks across a large number of units: smooth, saturated, single colours, and a finish that would still look new after years of tenancies.
Sun Studio reverse printed them. The colour is printed on the back face of the glass, so what a resident cooks against, wipes down and scrubs is bare glass, with the ink sealed behind it.
Project facts
- Client
- Confidential hotel apartment development
- Location
- Dubai
- Material
- Toughened glass
- Printing service
- Glass printing, second surface
- Application
- Kitchen splashbacks
- Finish
- Smooth flat colour, reverse printed
The requirement
A kitchen splashback in a rented apartment has the hardest life of any decorated surface in the building. It takes heat, oil, steam, tomato and citrus, and it is scrubbed by people who did not choose the finish and will not be paying to replace it.
The brief was smooth colour rather than pattern, which is less forgiving. A flat field of a single colour shows every streak, every density shift and every mark in a way a busy pattern hides.
What we did
Every panel was printed on the second surface. The ink goes on the back and is seen through the thickness of the glass, so the working face is glass and nothing else. Nothing on the front can be scratched off, because there is nothing on the front.
For a solid colour, the build is laid down as a full flood rather than a thin pass, so the colour reads dense and even when it is lit from the front by under-cabinet lighting. Under-cabinet light rakes across a splashback at a shallow angle, which is the angle that exposes an uneven lay-down.
The panels were produced to a schedule against the unit types, so a colour repeats identically across every apartment it belongs to.
Technical considerations
Glass is printed after it is cut, drilled and toughened, never before. Socket and switch cut-outs are made at the glazier before the panel reaches the bed, because a toughened panel cannot be cut afterwards.
On a second surface print the colour is seen through the glass, and float glass carries a slight green cast. Pale colours shift a little towards green unless that is accounted for, which is why a sample on the actual glass settles a colour far better than a swatch does.
The outcome
Splashbacks that stay smooth because the colour is not on the surface being cleaned, in a building where every kitchen has to look the same on handover as it did on the first day.