Blackout Shades & Blinds for Bedrooms

A bedroom is the one room where light control is not a preference, it is the whole job. Room darkening window shades take the edge off; true blackout shades and blinds put the room in the dark you need for a night shift, a baby's nap, or a west-facing window that gets the full evening sun. The difference is worth understanding before you order, because the words get used loosely across this industry and we would rather you get the right thing.

Room darkening versus blackout

Room darkening fabric cuts most of the light and leaves a soft glow. Blackout fabric passes none through the cloth itself. On any shade mounted inside the window frame, a little light still comes around the edges. That is the gap the shade needs to move freely, not a flaw in the fabric. If you want the darkest possible result, mount outside the frame and overlap the opening on all four sides. It is the single biggest improvement you can make, and it costs nothing but a larger shade.

Four ways to get there

Blackout roller shades are the simplest: one flat panel of blackout cloth, nothing to gather dust, quiet to operate. Blackout cellular shades add insulation, because the honeycomb traps a layer of air, which matters on a bedroom window that is cold in January and hot in July. Blackout roman shades give you soft folds and a more furnished look where a flat panel would read as utilitarian.

Woven wood is the one that surprises people, because the material itself is open weave. It reaches blackout through an attached blackout liner, available in nine colors, BL1 through BL9: white, off white, light gray, camel, cream, dark gray, taupe, dark brown, and black. With no liner a woven shade is roughly 50% see-through. With a light filtering liner it is about 70% closed. With the blackout liner it is 100% blackout: the natural texture you wanted on the room side, fully blocked behind. When you choose a liner, both the shade and its valance get it, so the top of the window is not a bright strip above a dark shade.

One sizing rule to know before you measure

Blackout goods are heavier and are milled on narrower rolls than light filtering fabrics, so a blackout shade does not reach as wide as the light filtering version of the same shade. On several of our systems that is 86" in blackout against 96" in light filtering. It is not a rule we invented; it is the width the cloth comes in.

For a bedroom window wider than that, such as a wide master window or a slider onto a balcony, we build multiple shades on one continuous headrail to 118" total, which reads as a single covering across the top. Tell us the opening size and we will tell you which side of that line you are on.

Every blackout shade and blind here is made to your measurements. If you are matching an existing shade in the room, order a sample first: blacks and grays photograph almost identically on a screen and rarely match in the room.