Ask around and you'll hear it: Breslow costs more than the guy who shows up, bolts a louvered roof to four posts, and leaves. We know it, and we're not shy about why. A motorized pergola is a serious piece of equipment, but the equipment is only half the job. The other half is making it look like it was always supposed to be there — and that's the part most installers skip.
Most companies in this space sell you a structure. They'll get the posts plumb, run the wiring, pair the remote, and call it done. What they usually won't touch is everything around the structure — the awkward gap between the pergola beam and your existing roofline, the exposed ledger board, the transition where the new footprint meets an old deck or a fence line that doesn't quite line up. Those gaps don't go away on their own, and left alone they're what make an otherwise beautiful pergola look like an add-on instead of part of the house.
This is where the extra cost actually goes. We build custom vertical packouts — often in AZEK — specifically to close those gaps and tie the pergola into whatever it's sitting against: a house wall, a parapet, an existing structure, a change in grade. It's carpentry and design work layered on top of the pergola install, not part of it. AZEK is the right material for this because it behaves like real trim — it can be shaped, capped, and detailed to match existing fascia, columns, or skirting — but it won't rot, cup, or need repainting the way wood trim does sitting outside year-round.
The reason this matters more than people expect: a pergola is a big, visually dominant structure. If the connection points around it are left raw or improvised, your eye goes straight to the seam, not the pergola. A packout that's built to match your house's trim profile, painted or capped to the right reveal, and scaled correctly does the opposite — it disappears. The louvered roof reads as architecture, not attachment.
This is also why we don't turn away the installs other companies pass on. Odd angles, tight side yards, a rooftop with parapet walls, a pergola that has to marry up to a commercial storefront facade — those jobs require someone who thinks in terms of custom trim carpentry and structural tie-ins, not just someone who can hang a louvered roof kit. We treat the shade system and the finish work as one project, priced and built together, because that's the only way the end result actually looks intentional.
None of this means Breslow is a general contractor — we're not reframing decks or building additions. Everything we do, including the custom carpentry, exists to make the outdoor living and shade system work as one cohesive space. The packouts, the trim details, the tie-ins — they're in service of the pergola, not a separate trade we happen to also offer.
If you're comparing quotes and one number is noticeably higher, this is usually the difference: the lower bid is pricing the pergola. The higher one is pricing the pergola actually fitting your house. For a structure you'll look at every day for the next fifteen years, that's usually the cheaper decision in the long run, not the more expensive one.