Our roller blind solutions enable you to optimise visual, acoustic and thermal comfort, complete any design theme, and support a healthy, productive environment.
Kvadrat Shade offers versatile systems for all windows, characterised by aesthetic excellence and outstanding flexibility. We unite hardware designed by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec and textiles created by celebrated designers. End-to-end support through Kvadrat’s global network completes the offering.
Our metallised textiles support a comfortable indoor temperature with a reduced need for heating and cooling. The highly reflective aluminium backing of our metallised textiles significantly reduces heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer, creating the optimal indoor climate.
To keep harsh sunlight and heat out during summer, you need to lower the window blinds. Conventional white coloured blinds cause glare, dark coloured blinds warm up your interior, and block-out blinds obstruct the view.
Kvadrat's collection of metallised High Performance Textiles offers unrivalled visual comfort inside your building. Enjoy the benefits of daytime privacy without compromising the view outside. Our metallised textiles eliminate heat and glare issues in buildings, maximising the value of space by making areas close to windows usable.
Large windows and hard surfaces to open-plan zones, typical features of contemporary architecture, can reduce well-being of occupants. With our Kvadrat Shade roller blind solutions you are able to meet these challenges, and increase well-being and productivity in every space you design.
The Kvadrat Shade offering includes personalised support – from initial consultation to installation. Our expert centre can support you with energy-saving calculations, credits for green building certificates like LEED and BREEAM, and advice on specifications, regulations and budget to create the optimal solution for your project.
Kvadrat High Performance Textiles are crafted with an ultra fine layer of aluminium, so they are highly reflective. As they reflect up to 80% of the solar radiation, they prevent heat absorption. In practice, this means metallised textiles are very effective as indoor solar shading. They are independently verified as an equivalent alternative to outdoor solar shading.
They reduce the need for heating and cooling – and therefore, energy consumption. And the less energy used, the lower the carbon emissions.
On our website, we have a tool where you can get a rough estimate of your potential energy savings. Furthermore, we can make detailed calculations on the heat gain (G-value) and cold/heat loss (U-value) and quantify the impact that we can make on these with our metalised textiles. This service is available on request.
Visual comfort is the ability to have a view out without glare. Achieving this is a delicate balance, as using a textile with too high transparency will result in too much sunlight entering the building.
In general, an openness factor of 2-4% ensures a good view of the outside. Meanwhile, the total light transmission through the pores (the openness factor) and the yarns, should not be higher than 7%.
In practice, light transmission through the yarns plays an important role and should be as low as possible. By applying an ultra-thin layer of non-transparent aluminium to the translucent yarns, you eliminate the diffuse light through these yarns. This enables you to have a transparent textile with a great view through, without having the glare issues due to diffuse light.
The sunlight that hits a building is energy. The window partly reflects it, and some energy is absorbed and passes through the window.
The reflective layer of aluminium on metallised textiles reflects over 80% of the incoming energy before it turns into heat. Neither the screen nor the room heats up. In the summer, this creates thermal comfort and reduces the need for air-conditioning.
In wintertime, the same layer of aluminium works as a low-emissivity coating and an insulator. In other words, it prevents heat and cold transfer through the fenestration. It improves the insulation, limits the heat loss and keeps the cold outside.
Especially when used as part of a Kvadrat Shade automated blind solution, metallised textiles can optimise the thermal comfort in summer and winter by opening up the blinds and closing them when needed.
It takes a lot of energy to make pure aluminium. However, we only use a minimal amount for metallised textiles through nano-technology. When you balance the energy savings, they deliver against the energy used in their creation, the pros outweigh the cons, within the first year.
There are several. The key benefits include:
Return on investment – outdoors shading is much more costly to acquire, install and maintain.
Exterior aesthetic freedom – indoor solar shading does not affect the design of the façade.
Windproof – indoor solar shading can be used regardless of the wind conditions.
Extra insulation benefits – these are even greater with metallised textiles, as the aluminium is a low-emissivity coating that blocks heat and cold transfer. We can achieve 40% improvements in window insulation.
Unfortunately, you can't. The solution is to prevent incoming solar energy (light) being transformed into heat by absorption (short wave into longwave radiation). Aluminium reflects the incoming light through the window before it can be absorbed and turns into heat.
Vacuum metallising follows the same fundamental principles as a bathroom mirror fogging up: warm vapour condenses and bonds to a cooler surface.
In our metallising chamber, we heat pure aluminium up to 1400 C in vacuum to create aluminium vapour. The vapour rises in the chamber and condenses on the fibres on one side of the fabric.