Alendel Sheer Fabrics

Nothing suits a wall of South Florida glass like a sheer, and this page is every cloth Alendel types as one: 827 colourways in 164 patterns, from plain polyester voiles in sixty-odd colours to linen-look sheers, embroidered and printed sheers and the few cotton and silk ones. Most of them are wide-width, 115 to 145 inches, which is the number that matters: railroaded, the width becomes the drop, so a window wall up to about ten feet high runs seamless from end to end. The rest are 54 to 60 inch goods that run up the roll for single windows, doors and bedrooms.

Every pattern opens to its own page with all of its colourways, the swatch, Alendel's width, content, repeat, care code, fire listings and weight per yard, and the stock flag. The filters below sort the page by colour family, width, care, fire listing, Oeko-Tex and Alendel book. What a sheer does is the same for all of them: it filters hard sunlight into an even glow, keeps the view and gives no privacy at night with the lights on, so a bedroom takes a lined or blackout panel on a second track behind it.

By day a sheer takes the glare off a white sofa and the sharp edge off a west wall without hiding the water. It softens the architecture, calms the echo in a glass-and-stone room and frames the view instead of blocking it. That is why living rooms and dining rooms on the Intracoastal and the ocean run sheers alone, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, on a track that glides thirty feet of fabric open in silence.

At night, with the lights on inside, the room is visible from outside, and no sheer changes that. Where privacy after dark matters, a lined or blackout panel rides on a second track behind the sheer, or a solar or blackout roller sits in the window behind it; the sheer stays the layer you see. A sheer is not a blackout and not a UV shade either: it filters a share of the light and the UV, and where the furniture has to be protected a solar screen behind it does that job.

Wide-width sheers are not cut into Roman shades. The weave runs sideways in a railroaded panel, which is right for a drapery and wrong for the folds of a Roman; for a matching Roman we pick a 54 inch cloth from the same Alendel book. The one number to check on any sheer before falling for the colour is the width against the ceiling height: a 118 inch cloth runs seamless to about nine feet ten, and a taller wall is seamed or turned back up the roll.

Sheers are our most requested drapery from Brickell and Miami Beach condos to Fort Lauderdale waterfront homes and Palm Beach island, and an Alendel wide-width sheer is made up the way our published sheer projects were: ripplefold sheers on Lutron Sivoia QS tracks across five rooms at the Ritz-Carlton Residences Miami Beach, to the designer's fabric schedule; wide-width sheers on recessed Somfy tracks across an ocean wall in Boca Raton, with the fullness trimmed so the stack clears the glass; sheers up to sixteen feet high on wired tracks through a new estate in Southwest Ranches, finished flush to the floor. Custom sheers on a manual track are quoted per linear foot of width, and the pricing page has the figures; every panel is cut and sewn by our five in-house seamstresses in Fort Lauderdale.