It has been experimentally proven that thinning an amorphous layer, sandwiched between two crystals, up to the nanometer scale, leads to a higher crystallization temperature. The present work is an attempt to explain such behaviour on the basis of thermodynamical arguments. The approach assumes that a nanometric amorphous layer is submitted to the crystal field leading to a gradient of atomic density across the glassy layer. It is shown that the stabilisation of the glassy layer is expected when approaching a thickness of few nanometers. This study is closely related to the concerns of the phase change optical storage because such a technology involves both the use of very thin films and fast structural transitions between the two states (amorphous and crystalline) of the active material. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.