Bathroom Shades & Blinds

A bathroom window has two jobs that pull against each other. It has to keep the room private, often at eye level from a neighbor or the street, and it has to let in enough daylight that you are not switching on the lights at noon. It also sits in the one room of the house that fills with steam every day, which quietly rules some materials out. The shades on this page are the ones we would put in a bathroom, and the notes below explain why others are missing.

Which shades belong in a bathroom

Roller shades lead here because of what they are made of. Our roller fabrics are polyester, and polyester tolerates humidity in a way natural fibers do not. The paperwork reflects that: the roller warranty does not list moisture exposure as an exclusion. A light filtering roller is the everyday bathroom shade, screening the view while the room stays bright. A blackout roller uses fabric rated at 100 percent blackout, the one for a window that faces a close neighbor or a street light.

Light filtering cellular shades are the privacy answer, especially as top down bottom up. The shade lowers from the top to bring daylight in over the upper glass while the lower part of the window stays covered, then raises from the bottom when you want the view. For the window right beside the shower, roller is still our first recommendation, since it is the line whose warranty does not exclude moisture.

Woven wood is left off this page on purpose. Natural weaves warp and distort with prolonged moisture, and moisture damage is excluded from the woven wood warranty. Keep it for the rooms next door.

Small and awkward bathroom windows

Bathroom windows are often narrow, so minimum sizes decide the order. A manual clutch loop roller starts at 11 3/4 inches wide. Cordless roller needs 19 3/4 inches on our slimmer 2 15/16 inch cassettes and 23 5/8 inches on the 3 1/2 inch squared cassette. A motorized roller needs 8 to 10 inches more width than the manual version, because the motor has to fit inside the tube.

Cellular goes smaller. Cordless cellular builds from 12 inches wide and 12 inches high, and the cordless top down bottom up version starts at 12 inches wide and just 8 inches high, reaching up to 98 inches wide and 94 inches high. On a bead chain, top down bottom up needs 19 inches of width, and a motorized cellular shade needs 23 inches of width and stops at 79 inches high.

Cordless is the natural lift in a bathroom, with no loose cords near the tub or basin. If you would rather motorize a hard to reach window above a bath, our shade motors carry an IP44 rating and recharge from a 5V charger in about four hours.

Measuring and installing

Measure the opening itself at every window, even where two look identical. For an inside mount cellular shade, take 1/4 inch off the measured width to clear the frame. For an outside mount, add about 3 7/8 inches to both width and height for better coverage.

Roller shades mount on a cassette bracket. You need a 6 mm drill bit, the screw holes sit 1.1 inches apart, and two kinds of expansion anchor come in the box, one suited to drywall and one to masonry, so match the anchor to your wall. Fix each bracket with two screws on opposite sides, hook the valance groove over the latch and press back until it clicks, then check that the top and rear have both locked. To take the shade down for cleaning or painting, press the metal retaining washer at the rear of the bracket. Never pry the valance off the front, which bends the latch.

Every shade is made to measure and shipped direct, with a limited lifetime warranty against defects in materials and workmanship, and a separate five-year warranty on motors and controls.