★Residential · Service

Motorized Shades · Kansas City.

A shade that answers to the same button as the lights, not a separate app. IntegrateIT installs Lutron motorized shades across Kansas City, Missouri and the Johnson County suburbs from Overland Park, Kansas, and commissions them on the same Lutron HomeWorks processor that runs the lighting, so one keypad press dims the room and sets the shades together. Sivoia QS Roman and roller shades, Palladiom rollers where the hardware is meant to be seen, Triathlon battery drives where no wire can reach. Wired versus battery, pocket versus fascia, and fabric openness are decided per opening, not per house. Lutron Certified Installer, Control4 Platinum dealer, Crestron Elite Partner and CEDIA member, so shades can sit under whichever platform the house already runs. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Wired or battery: the decision that expires at drywall

Every motorized shade project reduces to one early question with a long tail: does each opening get a low-voltage run to the head of the window, or does it get a battery drive? While the walls are open, that run costs almost nothing — it is another cable on the same rough-in day, pulled by the same crew, on the same trip. Once the drywall is up, the same cable is a construction project.

• Wired Sivoia QS drives. Power and control arrive at the head pocket, and the shade becomes a fixture rather than a device. No batteries, no ladder schedule, no seasonal surprise from the one opening nobody can reach. This is the default on new construction and on any remodel that opens the ceiling near the glass.
• Battery drives — Lutron Triathlon. The honest answer for finished plaster houses, stone or masonry walls, and stairwell glass with no path above it. They are quiet, they align across a bank, and they are the reason a retrofit shade project is possible at all. What you are accepting is a maintenance rhythm: batteries get changed, and the higher the opening, the more that costs in access rather than in parts.
• Mixing them is normal. Most finished-home projects we run end up part wired, part battery, decided opening by opening after the survey. What matters is that the mix is chosen deliberately and written down, not discovered at install.
• Plan the run even if you defer the shade. On new construction we routinely pull shade power to openings the owner has not committed to yet. It is the cheapest option anyone buys on the whole project, and it keeps every choice open for a decade.

If you are building or gutting, this belongs in the same conversation as the rest of the low-voltage scope — see new-construction low-voltage rough-in, which is where shade power, keypad runs and the head-pocket detail all get coordinated against the GC’s schedule rather than after it.

Pockets, fascia, and where the hardware goes

A motorized shade is a roller, a drive, brackets and a hem bar. The design question is where those live when the shade is open, and there are exactly three honest answers.

• A framed pocket. The shade rolls up into a recess in the ceiling or head detail and disappears completely. The pocket has to be framed to a dimension that comes off the shade schedule, because roll diameter is a function of fabric thickness and shade height — a tall stairwell shade in a heavier weave needs a materially bigger pocket than a bedroom shade in the same fabric. This is why the shade schedule has to exist before the ceiling is closed, and why “we will add shades later” usually means “we will add fascia later.”
• A fascia. A finished cover in front of the roller, painted to the ceiling or wrapped to match millwork. Visible, but deliberate and clean, and it is the right answer in most retrofits. Done properly it reads as a header detail rather than as a shade box.
• Exposed hardware, designed on purpose. This is what Palladiom is for. The bracket and roller are treated as an object in the room, in finishes chosen with the designer, rather than as something to hide. In a room with a lot of glass and a lot of intention, it is often the better-looking answer than a pocket.

Two details that separate a good shade install from an expensive one. Hem alignment: a bank of shades across one elevation must stop on a single line, and holding that line across openings of different widths is a commissioning task, not a hardware feature. Light gaps: every roller leaves a gap at the jambs, and in a bedroom or a theater that gap is the whole point of the shade — which is what side channels are for, and which is a decision that has to be made while the opening is still being detailed.

Fabric, openness, and picking per elevation

Openness factor is the percentage of the weave that is physically open. It is the single number that decides how the room feels, and the trade it describes is one-dimensional: the more you can see out, the more sun gets in. A 1% fabric holds glare hard and mutes the view. A 3% is the usual living-room compromise. A 5% or 10% keeps the view largely intact and admits the heat and glare that come with it. Blackout has no openness at all.

So we specify it per elevation rather than per house. Blackout in primary bedrooms and any dedicated media room. Tighter weaves on the south and west glass, where a Kansas City afternoon does real work and keeps radiating into the room for hours after the sun has moved off it. Opener weaves on the north, where there is no glare to fight and the view is the only thing that matters. Two shades in the same room can carry different fabrics if they face different directions, and in rooms with a corner of glass that is usually the right call.

Fabric also carries the aesthetic decisions your designer cares about — weave, color, whether the shade reads as textile or as a plane — and it is the input to the roll diameter that sizes the pocket. That is the practical reason we pull the designer into the shade conversation at schematic rather than at order: three separate decisions ride on one fabric choice, and only one of them is how it looks.

Why the shades belong on the lighting processor

A motorized shade bought as an appliance gives you an app that raises and lowers a shade. A motorized shade commissioned on Lutron HomeWorks alongside the lighting gives you something different: shade position becomes one more thing a scene sets, in the same instruction, at the same time, from the same wall.

• Scenes move light and shade together. Movie drops the room to 12%, takes the TV wall to zero and closes the west elevation in one press. Dinner sets the kitchen and dining levels and holds the shades where the room still feels open. Goodnight closes everything and leaves the bedside lamps. That is one keypad, not an app and a remote and an argument.
• The astronomical clock does the work you would otherwise forget. HomeWorks knows sunrise and sunset for this latitude on this date, so shades close ahead of the sun rather than after somebody notices the room is hot — which in July on a west wall is a difference of hours. Sun-tracking holds an intermediate position that blocks the load without giving up the view.
• Keypad engraving names it in English. The button says what it does, laser-engraved rather than labelled, and when the room changes we re-engrave the button and re-cut the scene behind it in the same visit. A shade system nobody can find on a wall gets used from a phone, which is to say rarely.
• It survives the platform above it. Control4 or Crestron sitting on top calls the same Lutron scenes rather than driving each shade individually, which is why a house can change its automation platform later without re-commissioning every window.

The lighting half of that system is documented on our smart lighting page, the platform itself on the Lutron system page, and if your shades already exist and have stopped behaving, Lutron service and repair covers drives, schedules and the legacy Sivoia QED upgrade path.

What drives the cost

The price is driven by four things: the width and height of each opening, the fabric you choose, whether the drive is wired or battery, and whether the head pocket already exists or has to be framed. Count the windows you actually want moving — that is the real variable, more than any other choice — and everything else is a smaller multiplier on top of it.

• A few rooms, about six shades. Primary bedroom, a bathroom, and the two or three living-room windows that take the afternoon.
• A main-level window wall, about fourteen shades. The whole west or south elevation at once, aligned as a bank on one hem line, on an astronomical-clock schedule.
• A whole-home package, about twenty-eight shades. Every window that should move, including the stairwell glass nobody can reach.

Where shades arrive alongside a full Lutron HomeWorks lighting system, the lighting and the shade package are priced and quoted separately, sized to what each actually needs rather than stacked as two unrelated numbers. What drives the cost of motorized shades and what drives the cost of Lutron HomeWorks cover each in full; ask what a given proposal already includes before comparing it to another one.

Coverage, plainly: every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the shades carry their Lutron manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system. Every project starts with a no-cost site walk, and the written proposal carries a fixed price for equipment, labor and timeline — not a range by email.

Questions every Kansas City owner asks