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Innovation meets aesthetics at the Boston Design Center

With 350,000 square feet of home and contract showrooms, the Boston Design Center is the premier resource for industry professionals to generate ideas and find answers to every home design question imaginable. Located at 1 Design Center Place in Boston, the Boston Design Center worked with Contexture Shading Solutions and Lee Kennedy in 2016 to design and install approximately 500 Draper manual FlexShades throughout the center’s 350,000 square feet. Designed specifically for institutional use and manufactured to endure the toughest conditions, the manual FlexShades offer an institutional-grade window shade with smooth and quiet operation, and independent control. These shades provide ease of use, longevity, and low maintenance for commercial facilities. Phifer SheerWeave fabrics were also selected to provide enhanced UV protection. 

With more than 70 showrooms in the Boston Design Center, the manual FlexShades offer UV protection for the 1,200 luxury product lines that run the gamut from indoor to outdoor design, including fabrics, furniture, lighting, antiques, art, and kitchen and bath décor. Due to unstable base install conditions with old concrete, Contexture came up with a customized solution for the Boston Design Center using finished wood blocking. The white fascia and white painted wood blocking were paired with the standard Draper FlexShade clutch operated shades which used either 4400 (3% open) or 3500 (5% open) fabric in the color Greystone, depending on the orientation of the window. The installation of the new shades during the center’s new window project also led to several other small fit-out projects within the building. Contexture installed approximately a dozen smaller fit-outs through Lee Kennedy and some directly to the tenants to make the interior spaces suitable for occupation. 

By partnering with Contexture to provide the latest in manual shading solutions, the Boston Design Center will continue to be the ultimate destination for New England’s luxury design community.