Salato, Pompano Beach

Three units, one standard, and the wiring nobody sees

Salato is a new boutique building on the ocean in Pompano Beach, and we did the same residence three times, on three floors - the same layout every time, the top one a penthouse with ceilings a foot higher. The fabric decision came from the light. The side of the building hits the dining room straight on, so that glass carries Mermet E Screen at 3%, which blocks more. The ocean side sits under a terrace with another terrace above it, and the view there is priceless, so we used E Screen at 5% - a little more light and, more to the point, more of the ocean through the screen while it still does its work against the sun. Same fabric everywhere, White/White, so the whole unit reads as one. The bedrooms take Sparta Twilight blackout in White/White.

Every shade runs on Somfy Sonesse ULTRA 50 RTS - 24 V DC from a power panel in each unit, rated 35 dB by Somfy - on 2.5-inch aluminum tubes, the largest tube made for interior shades. On a 147-inch dining shade a smaller tube telegraphs into the fabric as ripples and reflections; the big tube is one of the two ways to stop that (the other is a premium fabric that rolls flat), and it went on every wide opening. The master bedroom shade is 144 by 120 inches, made as a single shade with one seam. Situo 1 remotes for the single-shade bedrooms, a Situo 5 in the master, a Telis 16 in the living room, and in every unit a power panel with a Somfy TaHoma switch tied into the Crestron system - with every room mapped to Google Home, so "Hey Google, open the living room" opens the whole wall.

The hard part was the wiring. A new condo comes with empty conduit and a pull line, and that is all; some of that conduit was broken inside the walls, so we opened the wall, fixed it and closed it again, and we mapped the electrician's routing first because every conduit here runs on to another window. The first unit took two days to wire eight windows. What made the second and third go faster was a dedicated fish tape and 4-conductor 18 AWG cable - each motor needs two conductors, so one cable feeds two motors and is split by colour at the end; some runs still needed two of them. Lose the line inside a broken conduit and you are into concrete. The end goal on a job like this is simple to say and hard to do: every shade powered, and not one wire visible.

Then the fit. Some windows are recessed and some are not; every wall has a baseboard, so the tube and brackets sit wider than the fabric and the fabric is cut narrower to drop between the baseboards without touching them - more details, more measuring. The dining shades run about 147 by 120 inches, the bedrooms 144 by 120, and in the penthouse everything is a foot taller, 147 by 132. And the building is not level - nothing new is - so every shade got a bead of caulk along its top to close the gap, and the adjustments to hang level were ours to make.