Crestron Fabrics

The programme is two sample books and a third, smaller collection. The Heritage Collection is the established mill weaves: Mermet's E Screen, E Screen KOOLBLACK, M Screen and S Screen, Phifer's SheerWeave screens, and Esprit, Emma, Santos and Grant from Coulisse: every design in it is a basketweave screen. These are the vinyl-coated fiberglass and coated polyester screens we have cut for Lutron and Somfy shades for years, most of them with a solar figure published for every colourway. The Designer Collection is the decorative book: the Coulisse polyester sheers, light-filtering weaves and blackouts, several of them paired under one colour name in a daytime and a night version, together with Phifer's SheerWeave 7001, 7400, 7450 and 7500 and Mermet's Vizela and Flocke. Keystone, Vail and Telluride belong to neither; they are the fabrics of the Crestron Horizontal Sheer Shade and are sampled in their own book.

A Crestron shade is specified in the Crestron Design Tool by a dealer: the fabric, the tube, the Digital QMT motor and the Architectural or Decor hardware go in together and come out as one configured shade for one opening. The fabric sets the limits. Its roll width, and whether Crestron allows it to be railroaded or seamed, decide how wide the shade can be in one piece; its weight, with the width and the height, decides whether the QMT3 or the QMT5 motor drives it; and its listing in the Fabric Information Guide decides which hembar it can carry. We run every opening through that tool ourselves, at the measure, so the answer comes back as a shade that fits the pocket rather than a fabric that might.

The hembar is the weighted rail at the bottom of the shade, and Crestron makes four. The Open Pocket tapes the rail inside a welded pocket with its ends painted to coordinate; the Sealed Pocket encloses it fully; the Exposed Blackout hembar is the one for blackout shades and side channels; and the Designer Half-Wrap wraps the rail in the shade's own fabric with no weld line and a flush end cap, on select fabrics up to 120 inches wide. The guide lists each fabric as taking either all four or the Open, Sealed and Exposed three, and the design pages print which. Railroading, where Crestron allows it, turns the fabric 90 degrees so a shade can be wider than the roll; a shade that is then taller than the roll width needs a seam, which we place at a mullion, and Crestron's advice is to railroad every shade in the room once one is railroaded.

Every colourway sits in one of four price tiers, Tier 1 the least and Tier 4 the most, and that tier is the only price signal Crestron publishes for a fabric: there is no fabric price, only a budgetary estimation guide from June 2022 that gives one figure per tier for each of three shade sizes. The grid is printed lower on this page and on every design page with the design's tier named, so a reader can put a Tier 2 E Screen and a Tier 4 KOOLBLACK 1% side by side before a measure. It is a guide, not a quote: it leaves out the control system, wiring, power, programming and installation, and Crestron may have moved it since. We quote the installed shade at the measure, with the commissioning included.