StaffOur trade-focused reviewer, Richard Stevenson, opts for Silent Gliss motorised blinds in his sunroom and is thoroughly rolled-up with the performance.
With nearly 12 sqm of glass facing south, the sunroom at the Stevenson Ranch was going to get toasty in the summer. Solar ‘E’ glass took the sting out of the greenhouse effect, certainly more than the plain glass windows and patio door it replaced, but I was still feeling a bit like a high-end tomato.
Having spent an inordinate amount of time building a blind recess in the ceiling (twice – the second time after the roof leaked), I wanted something sophisticated, quiet and shaded rather than black-out and fully synchronised so that the lower bars move together perfectly for the full James Bond villain’s lair effect. We have just the thing, said Stuart Tickle at AWE, at the time a Silent Gliss distributor.
Unlike our previous reviews, I cannot comment on the installation because the good people at Silent Gliss took over, possibly having read about some of my previous ham-fisted CI installs. They came out and measured up, offered a plethora of fabric samples with various light transmission values, looked at where I had put the wiring, and asked about what control systems I wanted to integrate. It was really rather nice being the ‘CI customer’ for a change.
At the heart of the Silent Gliss motorised roller blind proposition is its ultra-quiet motor technology. That makes them ideally suited to high-end environments where a motor that sounds like a Victorian cable car is not viable. The system’s ability to maintain a shared bottom-line baseline, even on blinds of differing sizes, is an engineering feature that elevates the installation from functional to exceptional, especially if you are thinking about taking over the world from the room being shaded.
THE BLIND-SIDE
The brand offers a versatile remote-control platform with native RF handsets and wall switches, but they can be fully integrated with the likes of Crestron, Control4, Lutron, Savant and KNX. With the appropriate interface modules, installers can program blinds to respond automatically to lighting scenes, time-of-day schedules, or solar tracking logic, Alexa or Siri, or discreet touch-panel automation. For simplicity in a house where control systems and equipment change with the weather, I went for the standard RF remote control.
Installers can specify from a suite of fabrics offering different levels of openness and opacity, so you can develop a whole-home lighting and shading strategy. We wanted some sun shading in the room. Yet at the same time, it would still be nice to see out on sunny days and to let light into the adjacent lounge. Rated in openness of the weave, we opted for a very open 10%.
A few weeks later, the three blinds had been created, and Silent Gliss called to book their installer. It took around three hours, including a cup of tea and fighting some rather tight wiring in the snug recess, to install the blinds.
Despite the very shallow recess, just 75mm, the baseline of the blinds does not extend below the ceiling height when fully rolled up. That was a pleasant surprise that tied in nicely with the LED strip light I fitted between the blind recess and the frame.
The first demo involved dropping all three blinds simultaneously. They unrolled virtually silently, fully synchronised and at a perfect pace, stopping millimetres from the floor, equally silently. Oh, it was enough to make me nip out and buy a fluffy white cat and hire a henchman with a bowler hat or a tooth issue.
A month on, and my wife and I have agreed that the Silent Gliss blinds are perfect. No, ‘99% there’, no ‘it would be nice if they did this or that’, just perfect. As a reviewer, I don’t say this about many things, but the quality, operation, fabric, near-silent motors, syncing and control are all brilliant.
For AV and custom installers working in the high-end residential and boutique commercial space, I would say Silent Gliss would be a prime shading option. In addition to roller blinds, the brand offers a vast range of shading styles in blinds and curtains, with impeccable fabric choices and, from my experience, flawless syncing.
While my wallet will take a little while to recover from being a CI customer rather than a CI reviewer this month, and we now need a new vacuum that handles cat hair, the sunroom is complete, and plans of world domination are forming nicely.
