French Door Shades & Blinds

French doors are a small, fussy install with three problems a regular window doesn't have: there is almost no depth to mount into, there is a handle sticking out of the middle of the glass, and the whole thing swings. Get those three right and a french door shade looks better than any other treatment on the door. Get them wrong and the shade catches the handle, rattles every time the door closes, or won't fit the frame at all.

Mounting depth

The glass on a french door usually sits in a shallow rebate with an inch or two of flat stile around it, far less than a window frame gives you. Every system we build has a minimum depth to mount flush. Woven wood, for example, needs 1⅝" of frame depth to mount at all and 2⅝" to sit fully flush inside the opening. Measure the flat area around the glass before anything else. Where the depth isn't there, the shade mounts on the face of the door instead, which is a perfectly good answer and often the tidier one on a painted door.

Handle clearance

The handle decides the width. A lever or a knob on a french door projects into exactly the space a shade wants to occupy, so the shade is either narrow enough to sit beside it or mounted proud of it on the door face. Tell us the distance from the edge of the glass to the handle and whether the handle is a lever or a knob, and we will size the shade to clear it. On a pair of doors, remember the shades are mirrored: the hardware sits on opposite sides.

Because the door moves, hold-down brackets at the bottom are worth having. They clip the bottom bar to the door so the shade travels with it instead of swinging against the glass every time someone walks through. Cordless and motorized lifts also suit doors better than a chain, which has somewhere to swing and something to catch on.

Which shades and blinds work on french doors

All nine of our systems are on this page. Cellular is the most popular on doors: it is light, it stacks into a small space at the top, and it insulates a big piece of glass. Solar shades hold the view through the door while cutting glare. Blackout roller suits a bedroom door onto a balcony. Woven wood looks right on a door onto a garden, and takes a liner when you want privacy after dark.

If you are also looking at shutters

We have been building french door plantation shutters for years, and for some doors they are the better answer. A shutter frames the glass, never touches the handle if it is built around it, and moves with the door as a solid panel. Shades win on cost, on stacking out of the way, and on doors where a shutter's frame would crowd the glass. If you are torn, the shutter page has the sizing rules for that side of the decision.

Every shade and blind here is made to your door's measurements. Send us the glass size, the flat depth around it, and where the handle sits.