Can you get blackout fabric onto a glass dome.
That question came in from an operator a while back and it stayed with me, mostly because the honest first answer was that I would need to go and look at one. A glazed pod undoes most of what an ordinary blind quietly relies on, and until you have stood inside one and watched where the light actually gets in, you are guessing. So we went and looked. Then we spent a while on it, and we now make blinds for glass igloos. With the right fabric on the right system they can help achieve a room darkening effect under a glass ceiling, which is what operators are really asking about when they ring up.
If you have not come across one, picture a glazed pod dropped into a clearing somewhere with a good northern sky, sometimes a full dome and sometimes a barrel vault with a flat end wall. Lodges use them, hotels use them, and a fair few glamping sites have put a row of them in along a treeline. The whole selling point is that you lie in bed and look straight up at the aurora through the glass. Lovely thing, genuinely. Then June arrives, the sun stops properly setting, and a guest who has paid a very good rate for a glass ceiling would quite like some hours of proper rest underneath it.
That is the brief. It is harder than it sounds.
Why a glass pod is harder than it looks
Two things make it awkward, and the first is the lean. Glass that tips back over the bed leaves you nothing to work off, and an ordinary blind has been leaning on gravity the entire time without anybody noticing, because gravity pulls the hem down, the fabric stays flat against the glass, and the arrangement works so quietly that you only discover it was doing any work at all on the day it stops. Tip past forty five degrees or so and it stops. The fabric bellies out through the middle. Give it a season and it wanders sideways, settles into one corner and starts letting light down the side, and I could describe how that goes without looking, because we have been called out to enough sagging rooflights over the years to know the pattern by heart.
The second thing is the curve, which is a good deal less forgiving than the lean. A pod is never going to become a rectangle to suit you, so a blind built square leaves a wedge of bare glass running down the sloping edge. On a landing window a wedge like that is a nuisance somebody mentions eventually. At three in the morning in an Arctic summer, with low sun coming straight through it and landing on a pillow, the wedge is the entire job, and the guest is awake, and somebody on reception is getting an email about it before breakfast.
What we are doing about it
None of this is unfamiliar ground, as it happens. It is more or less the problem we have been working on with apex and gable end glazing since the beginning, which is why saying yes to a dome did not mean inventing a new company to do it. The fabric runs on a tensioned system that holds it against the glass the whole way up and the whole way back down again, so there is nothing for it to sag into. That light gap along the sloped edge is handled by the mechanism we hold the patent on, and that mechanism is the reason we can take on shapes which get turned down elsewhere.
Somfy motors throughout, because nobody is fitting a hand crank above a bed at that angle. Add the right equipment and they will sit on a room control system such as Control4 or KNX, which stops being a luxury the moment you are running twenty pods and want the lot of them closed at check in, rather than sending somebody round with a remote and a torch.
We work from the pod manufacturer’s glazing drawings instead of measuring by eye, and for larger or more specialised installations our Technical Team can assist.
So if you operate glass igloos, panoramic lodges or glamping domes, and somebody has already told you once or twice that this cannot be done, it can. Send the drawings over and we will look at them properly.
If you would like to discuss your igloo project, please contact Matt on contact@sonashades.com.
