Hotels & Resorts

Blackout in a guest room is a perimeter problem, not a fabric problem. A coated triple-weave passes under 0.1% of the light that hits it, and a guest still wakes at 5.30 am because of the bright outline round the edges. Our guest-room standard is therefore a blackout roller in 22 mm aluminium side channels with a brush seal on the bottom rail and a cassette lip at the head, paired with a separate sheer for daytime use. One window, two blinds — trying to do both jobs with one fabric is the most common reason a new hotel gets sleep complaints in its first month.

Housekeeping drives the control specification. A room attendant should not walk 24 rooms to open 24 blinds, so we group motors by floor and by aspect: up to 20 groups per bridge, one wall switch per room for the guest, and a front-desk scene for the whole wing. Motors are specified under 38 dB because the blind runs at 6 am in a room where someone is asleep next door, and battery motors are the default on retrofit floors so a brownout leaves every room still operable.

Programme is the other half of the job. We build and get sign-off on one mock-up room before anything else is cut, then work wing by wing while the rest of the property trades, taking no more than the rooms your revenue manager agrees to hold out of inventory. Deliveries are staged to the floor being worked, because a hotel corridor is not a warehouse.

Finally, hotels need the fifth year to look like the first. We record the fabric batch and hardware model for each room type and hold matching parts for ten years, so a single failed motor or torn shade in 2031 is replaced with the same fabric rather than triggering a whole-floor re-shade. On beachfront properties every exterior blind uses 316 stainless fixings and solution-dyed acrylic canvas, because salt air will strip ordinary zinc plating within one season.