The project
A grand hotel on the Sanremo seafront serves breakfast facing the open sea — beautiful, blinding, and salted by the wind. A row of cassette arm awnings now drops over the terrace each morning and disappears into slim wall-mounted cassettes every evening.
Fabric that survives the sea
Solution-dyed acrylic fabric keeps its color under the Riviera sun and shrugs off the salt mist; the front valance breaks the low morning light without closing the view. Operation is a single button at the maître's station, so shade follows the sun from the first espresso to the last lunch plate.
Invisible when not needed
The cassettes were color-matched to the hotel's historic facade, so with the awnings retracted the terrace reads exactly as the architect drew it a century ago. Shade when the sun demands it, architecture the rest of the time.
