Motorized Shades & Custom Drapery

In Plain English: A shade is a system. The fabric, the hardware, the motor, the control, and the room around it all have to agree. We run the whole scope on one invoice. The fabrication goes through trusted to-the-trade workrooms. The accountability stays with us. People buy Restrepo sites. Not the manufacturers inside of them.

Who This Page Is For

Homeowners redoing a primary suite, a great room, a media room, or a whole house. People who have lived with cheap shades on chains and stick remotes and are ready for the version that disappears into the room.

Builders and architects spec’ing motorized window treatments into new construction. Anyone who has had to retrofit a shade pocket into a finished ceiling will know why we are pushing to be in the conversation before the drywall closes.

Interior designers who want one accountable partner for the soft-goods scope, the hardware, the motors, and the control programming. Designers who have been burned by a workroom that did not coordinate with the AV team will know exactly why this matters.

Building owners and management running amenity floors, common areas, and corridors that need shade discipline that survives commercial use. Buildings repositioning to compete with new construction. Buildings that need their amenity floors and lounges to feel like the inside of a great home.

Indoor Roller Shades

The roller shade is the workhorse. Done right, it is invisible. Done wrong, it is a constant reminder that something in the room was an afterthought.

We spec single rollers, dual rollers (sheer plus blackout on the same window), top-down bottom-up, and skylight shades. Cassette or fascia, exposed roller or pocketed into the ceiling. Hardwired or battery, depending on what the building lets us do without lying about cost.

The decisions that matter are not visible in the brochure. Roller diameter for the window height so the shade lays flat. Side-channel selection for blackout that actually blacks out. Bottom-bar weight that does not telegraph through a sheer fabric. Programming the motor stops so the shade lands where the room wants it, not where the factory default puts it. Those decisions are why a shade looks like it was designed in instead of dropped on.

Outdoor Roller Shades for Patios

This is the category that is growing the fastest. Five years ago an outdoor patio with motorized shades was an upgrade. Now it is the standard for any project that wants the deck or the covered loggia to be a real room.

Outdoor shades do four things at once. They hold heat in during the cool months and hold cooled air in during the summer, which means the outdoor space is actually usable in more weeks of the year. They keep bugs out. Mosquitoes, no-see-ums, gnats, pollen, and whatever else is on the wind. They give privacy when the patio faces a neighbor or a road. And they cut glare and surface temperature on a stone deck or an outdoor kitchen by enough to make the difference between using the room and giving up on it.

Our default for outdoor shades is Screen Innovations Kaos. Kaos is high-wind rated, which is the differentiator most people do not realize they need until they have lived with a non-rated shade. Most outdoor shades have to be raised the moment a storm rolls in. That is the moment you actually wanted the shade down. Kaos uses a patented retention system that keeps the shade in the track when the wind picks up. It scales up to twenty-four feet wide. Box or pocket mount. Nine standard powder-coat finishes that can be matched to a custom color. Wind-sensor capable. And it integrates with the same control system we already build the rest of your house around.

We use other brands when the application calls for it. Kaos is where we start for the patios that get weather, and that is most of them.

Custom Drapery

Drapery is the soft-goods half of the room. Shades give you light control. Drapery gives the room its texture, its acoustics, and its weight. The two work together. We do them together.

We coordinate the fabric selection with you and your designer, the hand-finishing with the workroom, the rod and hardware spec with the same people who are doing the motorization, and the install on site as a single coordinated visit. Hand-tacked pleats. Weighted hems. Lined for blackout where it matters and lined for body where it does not. Motorized rods on Lutron, Crestron, or whichever control system the rest of the house is on.

Indoor or outdoor drapery. We have done both.

Openness Factor, Explained

Openness factor is the percentage of the woven fabric that is not fabric. The lower the number, the tighter the weave, the more privacy, the more glare control, and the less of a view through the shade. The higher the number, the more open the weave, the more view, and the less privacy. This is the single decision that gets made wrong the most often when someone picks a shade off a sample card without ever holding it in the room.

Openness	Best for	What you give up
1%	Projection rooms, theaters, tight glare control, daytime privacy on a street-facing window	Most of the view through the shade
3%	The default for most living rooms, family rooms, and bedrooms with a moderate view	A small amount of nighttime privacy on a lit room
5%	View-forward rooms where you still want some glare control. Kitchens and great rooms with a strong outlook	Real daytime privacy from outside
10%	View-first rooms with no privacy concern. Waterfront, mountain, no neighbors close in	Most of the privacy and most of the glare control
Blackout	Primary bedrooms, media rooms, theaters, nurseries	All view through the shade. Almost always paired with a separate sheer or solar shade for daytime use

The right answer is almost never one shade. It is two. A sheer for daytime view and glare. A blackout for privacy and sleep. Both motorized. Both on the same control. Both stacking discreetly into the same pocket or fascia. That is dual roller. That is what most luxury rooms get.

Why We Sample Fabric on Every Window

The book lies. Not on purpose. The book is honest about what the fabric looks like in the showroom. The showroom is not your house. Shade fabric reads completely differently depending on the direction of light coming through it. North light is cool and flat. South light is warm and bright. East light is yellow in the morning. West light is red and orange at the end of the day. The wall color bounces into the shade. The floor bounces into the shade. The trim bounces into the shade. The same fabric can read warm taupe in your kitchen at ten in the morning and cold gray in your primary suite at four in the afternoon.

That is why we tape the actual fabric sample to the actual window in the actual room and we look at it in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night, before anyone places an order. It takes five minutes per room. It saves the conversation about why the shade looks wrong, six months later, when nothing can be done about it.

It also means that to make a whole house read consistent, we sometimes specify two or three closely related fabrics instead of one. One slightly warmer for the cool-light rooms. One slightly cooler for the warm-light rooms. The homeowner is not supposed to notice. The homeowner is supposed to walk through the house and feel that everything goes together. Matching the perceived color sometimes means changing the actual color. We catch which rooms need a different fabric before we order anything, not after.

Working With the Workroom

The big-box installer buys shades out of a catalog. The custom integrator works with the workroom. That is the entire difference, and you can feel it in the room from the first day.

One of our long-standing partners on the soft-goods side is Workroom Services, run by Bob Gallic out of Warren, New Jersey. Since 1990, Workroom Services has fabricated drapery, hardware, Roman shades, wall upholstery, and motorization for designers, architects, AV integrators, and builders across NJ, NY, and CT, the Hamptons, and Palm Beach. They are a 2022 Lutron Diamond Dealer. They travel to wherever the work is. They are to-the-trade only, which means they do not exist on a phone search and they are not building bargain panels for a big-box display.

We have other workroom partners we work with depending on the project, the designer’s existing relationships, and the scope. The point is the same across all of them. The fabric is hand-selected. The pattern is matched. The hems are weighted. The pleats are tacked. Roman shades are fabricated on a true grid so the folds land where the drawing said they would. The install is done by people who have done it ten thousand times, not by a delivery crew on their first job.

We run that scope under the Restrepo invoice. One contract. One warranty. One number to call when something is wrong. The workroom is a partner. The accountability is ours.

Possibilities Most People Do Not Know About

Dual roller. Sheer plus blackout on the same window, stacked into the same pocket. The single highest-impact upgrade for a primary suite or great room.
Top-down bottom-up. The shade can drop from the top to give light without giving up privacy on a street-facing room. Underused. Real value in a townhouse or an urban condo.
Skylight and sloped-glazing shades. Motorized only. There is no other way to actually use the shade. Real climate value for a top-floor primary suite or a great room with a glazed roof.
Coupled large openings. Multiple shades behaving as one across a wall of glass, programmed to start and stop together so the eye reads them as a single piece.
Wind sensors. An Eolis-style sensor pulls outdoor shades up before the wind crosses a threshold. The shade protects itself. The homeowner does not have to remember.
Sun and astronomical-time scheduling. Shades drop and lift on real solar position and sunrise-sunset, not a static clock that drifts as the seasons change.
Voice and panel control. Programmed inside Crestron, surfaced on the same panels as the lights and the AV. The shade is a part of the room, not a separate device.
Hardwired and solar-charged motors for outdoor. Outdoor scopes do not always have AC power where the shade is going. Solar-charged motors are real and they work. We use them when the application calls for it.

How We Run a Shades and Drapery Job

Site walk and measure. Someone from our team walks the rooms with the homeowner or the designer, talks through how the rooms are used, and takes measurements that the workroom can fabricate from. A bad measure is the single most common reason a custom shade fails. We do it ourselves.

Fabric and hardware in your light. Samples in the actual room, in the actual light. Never from a phone screen. The fabric that looks beige in the showroom can read pink at four in the afternoon. We bring the samples back if we have to.

Spec and shop drawings. The full scope written down. Pocket dimensions for the GC. Power locations for the electrician. Motor and control language for the integrator (which is also us). The drawings are how we keep three trades honest.

Fabrication and pre-stage. The workroom builds. We pre-stage the motors and controls in our shop. By the time the install crew is on site, the only thing left is to install and commission.

Install and program. Hung, leveled, programmed, and integrated into the rest of the house in one coordinated visit. Stops calibrated. Scenes tested. The homeowner gets a quick walkthrough and the shade just works from there.

We own the jobsite. We do not blame the workroom, the motor, the GC, or the electrician when something is off. We make it right and we sort out the cause behind the scenes. The homeowner gets the result. We carry the rest.

Service Area

We serve New Jersey (Bergen, Essex, Morris, Passaic, Hudson, plus the luxury towns of Alpine, Saddle River, Franklin Lakes, Short Hills, and Tenafly). Connecticut (Fairfield and Litchfield counties, Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Stamford, and Ridgefield). New York (Westchester, Manhattan, and the Hamptons). For long-term clients with second homes outside the region, we travel.

The Standing Pledge

People buy Restrepo sites. Not the manufacturers that are inside of them. If a shade or a drapery panel does not behave the way we said it would, we own it. We come back. We make it right. We do that whether the workroom is helping us or not, and whether the motor brand is helping us or not. Integrity always must come first, even when it hurts. I will tell you the truth even when it is uncomfortable.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you sell drapery and shades, or just install them?

We run the full scope. Drapery, hardware, shades, motorization, controls, and integration are on one Restrepo invoice with one warranty. The fabrication is done by trusted to-the-trade workrooms we have long relationships with. The accountability is ours. If something is wrong, you call us. Not the workroom. Not the motor brand. Us.

What is openness factor and how do I pick one?

Openness factor is the percentage of the fabric weave that is open. Lower number, tighter weave, more privacy and more glare control, less view. Higher number, more open weave, more view and more light, less privacy. One percent is for projection rooms and tight glare control. Three to five percent is the sweet spot for most living rooms and bedrooms. Ten percent is for view-first rooms where privacy is not a concern in the daytime. We pick the fabric on a sample, in your room, in your light. Never from a phone screen.

Are outdoor shades worth it?

On the right patio, outdoor shades pay for themselves in usable months. They hold heat in during the cool months and hold cooled air in during summer. They keep pollen, dust, and biting insects out of an outdoor room. They give privacy on a deck facing a neighbor. They drop the surface temperature of an outdoor lounge or kitchen by enough to make the difference between using it and not. We are seeing more of these every year. The category is growing for a reason.

Why Screen Innovations Kaos for outdoor?

Kaos is high-wind rated. That is the differentiator. Most outdoor shades have to be raised the moment a storm rolls in, which is exactly when you wanted them down. Kaos uses a patented retention system that keeps the shade in the track in real wind. It scales up to twenty-four feet wide. It comes in nine powder-coat finishes that can match a custom color. Box or pocket mount. Wind-sensor capable. Integrates with the same control system we already build the rest of your home around. We have other brands we use depending on the application. Kaos is where we start for the patios that get weather.

Hardwired motors or battery motors?

Hardwired wherever the building gives us the chance. Hardwired motors are quieter, faster, and never need a battery change. Battery motors are the answer for retrofits where opening the wall is not an option, and for second-position movements that do not justify a wire. Solar-charged motors are real and we use them on outdoor scopes where AC power is not nearby. The right answer depends on the project. We will not push hardwired into a building where the cost of opening the wall buys nothing. We will not push battery into a primary suite where the homeowner is going to hear that motor every morning for the next twenty years.

Do shades and drapery need to be on the same control system as the rest of the house?

If you want them to be useful, yes. A shade that lives on its own remote ends up in a drawer. A shade that lives inside the same Crestron scene as the lights, the AV, and the climate is the shade you actually use. The morning scene drops the primary-suite shades. The cinema scene drops the blackout. The weather sensor lifts the outdoor shades before the wind hits the threshold. That is the integration job. That is what we do.

Can you retrofit shades into an existing house without tearing the wall open?

Most of the time, yes. Battery motors, surface-mounted hardware, and careful trim work let us add motorized shades and drapery into a finished home without a renovation. We measure the way a workroom measures, not the way a big-box installer measures. We coordinate with the painter, the carpenter, and the millworker if any of them need to be involved. The point is that the finished installation looks like it was designed in from the start, not bolted on after.

How long does a shades and drapery scope take?

Custom shades and drapery are made to order. After we measure and the fabric is selected, fabrication is typically four to eight weeks depending on the fabric mill and the workroom queue. Outdoor shade frames and motors run a similar window. We tell you the dates we have at the moment we have them. We do not sandbag the schedule and we do not promise what we cannot deliver. If the workroom is twelve weeks out for a specific fabric, we tell you that the day we know it, and we offer the alternatives.