Motorized shades in a pre-war apartment:
three things that decide the job
New construction lets you choose a shade and then build around it. A pre-war apartment works the other way round: the window tells you what it will accept.
Most of the difficult decisions on a pre-war window are made before anyone opens a fabric book. Three conditions do most of the deciding, and all three are visible on a site visit long before they are visible on a drawing.
1. The sleeve under the window
Through-wall air conditioners and PTAC units were installed beneath the window when the building went up, sized to the units of that era, and the sleeve is a structural opening in the wall. It is not something a renovation moves. What it does is occupy the wall directly below the sill, and frequently project past the sill into the room.
That projection is what decides inside mount versus outside mount. An inside-mounted shade has to clear whatever is in front of it on the way down. A unit or a radiator that stands proud of the sill means the shade either stops short or fouls, so the treatment moves outside the opening and the detail changes: fascia, brackets, return, and the relationship to the trim all become visible design decisions rather than concealed ones.
2. Openings that are not square
Pre-war openings move. Settlement, a century of paint, and plaster applied by hand mean an opening can measure meaningfully wider at the bottom than at the top. Half an inch across a window is not unusual.
The professional habit is to measure at several points across the height and width and fabricate to the smallest dimension, then close the resulting gap with the mounting detail rather than with the shade itself. A shade cut to the widest measurement will bind; one cut to the narrowest leaves a light gap that has to be handled deliberately. Neither is a fabrication error — it is a decision about which compromise the room can live with, and it belongs to the designer, not the installer.
3. Power, or the absence of it
A motorized shade needs power, and a keypad or dimmer often needs a neutral conductor at the switch box. In buildings where partitions are masonry or plaster over solid block rather than stud and cavity, there is frequently nowhere to fish a new wire to. That is the practical constraint behind most of what follows.
- Battery-powered shades remove the wiring question entirely, at the cost of a maintenance cycle someone has to own.
- Wire-free systems are a genuine answer in landmarked and masonry buildings where opening a wall is not on the table.
- Where a wire can be run, running it during construction is always cheaper than running it afterwards.
- Surface raceway and millwork chases are legitimate routes, but they are design decisions and should be drawn, not improvised on site.
Lutron publishes dedicated repeater hardware specifically to extend wireless range where building construction attenuates the signal, which is a fair indication that dense construction affects reliability and that range should be planned rather than assumed.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the order the work has to happen in: the window first, then the shade. That is why every pre-war project we take on starts with a site visit rather than a fabric book.