Apartment Shades & Blinds

An apartment is a short list of windows with one complication. Usually it is three or four plain rectangular openings of roughly the same size, plus a sliding balcony door much wider than anything else in the place. Add the things that come with the building rather than the unit: a parking lot light or street lamp that never goes off, a neighbour's window twenty feet away, and single-glazed glass in anything older. These shades and blinds are made to the sizes you measure rather than the sizes a store stocks, and ship direct to your door.

Covering the windows and the slider

Roller shades are the backbone of an apartment order. They suit plain rectangular openings, take up almost no visual space in a small room, and are the system that also solves the balcony door. Blackout roller is the choice for a bedroom facing a lit street or car park, where the issue is not daylight but the light still there at eleven at night. Light filtering roller suits a living room you want screened during the day without shutting it down.

Cellular shades earn their place where the glass itself is the problem. If your building is older and the windows single-glazed, the cell structure holds a layer of air at the glass that a flat fabric cannot. Light filtering cellular is the general-purpose choice, blackout cellular the bedroom one. Zebra shades are worth a look in a studio or one-bedroom where a single window has to do everything: alternating sheer and solid bands slide past each other, so you set privacy and view on the same shade.

Sizes, sliders and lift options

The slider is where an apartment order needs checking. A single roller shade reaches 96 inches wide in light filtering fabric on our standard squared and round cassettes, and 86 inches in blackout, because blackout goods are milled on narrower rolls. A standard balcony door is usually wider than that. The answer is two shades on one headrail, reaching 118 inches in total, available on those same two cassettes. Have them as a separate system, where each shade works independently, or on a middle mechanism, where one clutch or motor drives both so they stay in step and the hardware costs less. Cordless is not available on the middle mechanism, since one spring cannot drive two panels.

For the ordinary windows, cordless is the usual choice, with no loose cords, which matters in a small home with a child or a pet. Cordless roller needs 19 3/4 inches minimum width on our standard squared and round cassettes, so check any narrow galley kitchen or bathroom window before ordering. Motors need more room still, roughly 20 1/2 inches minimum width on a roller, because the motor sits inside the tube. Our motors are rechargeable battery units, so there is no wiring to run; if you are on Apple devices choose the Matter motor, which talks to HomePod directly.

Measuring and putting them up

Measure every opening yourself rather than assuming the units match, because they rarely do, and measure the slider across the full opening you want covered rather than just the glass. For an inside mount, take 1/4 inch off the measured width to clear the frame. For an outside mount, add roughly 3 7/8 inches to width and height so the shade overlaps the opening and closes the light gap, which is the version to pick if blocking a street light is the main reason you are buying.

These fix to the wall or frame with brackets, so you will be drilling. You need a 6 mm bit, the brackets mark at 1.1 inch screw spacing, and two types of expansion anchor come in the box so you can match the anchor to the wall you actually have. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes, and two screws on opposite sides hold a normal shade on a sound wall; use the other two for the wide slider shade, which is heavier. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press back until it clicks, and check both top and rear have locked. Worth confirming your lease allows wall fixings before you start.