Motorized shades in Los Angeles, built here and installed in two days

What you are actually buying

A motorized shade is three decisions, not one: the fabric, the motor and the control. Get any of the three wrong and you live with it for fifteen years, so it is worth understanding what each one does before anyone quotes you a number.

The fabric decides the room

Fabric openness is the single most important number and almost nobody explains it. A 5% openness fabric keeps most of your view and cuts most of the glare. A 1% fabric is darker and more private but the view softens. A blackout fabric stops light entirely and there is no view at all. We bring samples and hold them against your own window, in your own light, because a swatch under showroom lighting tells you nothing.

The motor decides the experience

• Battery motors slide into the tube, need no wiring, and recharge about once a year with a cable. Right for a house that is already finished.
• Hardwired motors run on low-voltage wire back to a power supply. Never need charging, handle heavy and oversized shades, and are the obvious answer if walls are open.
• Solar-assisted motors trickle-charge from a small panel on the glass. Useful on high windows you would rather never touch again.

We hold an electrical license, so hardwired work is done properly and inspected rather than run through an extension cord behind the curtain.

The control decides whether you actually use them

Most people think they want an app and then discover they want a button on the wall. In practice the households that love their shades use scenes: everything in the living room down at 4pm when the west sun arrives, everything up at 7am except the bedroom. We set those up during the install rather than handing you a manual.

Where motorized shades earn their money

• Tall and hard-to-reach windows — stairwells, double-height living rooms, clerestory glass above a kitchen. If you need a ladder, you will never adjust it manually.
• West-facing glass — the afternoon sun in the Valley is punishing. A scheduled shade closes before the room heats instead of after.
• Bedrooms — waking up to shades that open on a schedule is the feature people mention most a year later.
• Sliding doors and large spans — a heavy shade is unpleasant to pull by hand every day.
• Rooms with a lot of glass — once you have more than four or five windows, doing it by hand stops being realistic.