Great Room Shades & Blinds

A great room puts the living room, the family space and often the kitchen under one high ceiling, and the windows follow the ceiling up. Most have a row of openings at eye level with a second tier of glass above. That glass is the reason the room feels open, but it also floods the sofa and the TV with afternoon glare, and the upper panes sit far beyond arm's reach. Great room shades and blinds have to cover big openings at two heights, look like one set, and be easy to run when half the windows are out of reach. Every shade here is made to measure and shipped direct to you.

Which shades and blinds suit a great room

Solar shades lead because glare is the main complaint in a room built around glass. They are sold by openness at 1, 3, 5 and 10 percent, blocking roughly 80, 70, 60 and 50 percent of light, so you cut the glare on the TV wall and still keep the view.

Light filtering roller shades give the same flat, quiet face in a softer fabric, a good choice where the view matters less than an even glow across the room. Light filtering cellular shades add a soft pleated face and, on a bead chain, cover the widest and tallest openings of anything we make. Woven wood shades bring natural texture in bamboo, jute, reed and other fibers, which warms up a tall room, with a light filtering liner for privacy after dark.

Choose one fabric color for both tiers and match the cassette to the window trim, so the upper and lower shades read as one wall.

Tall drops, upper windows and motors

Height is the constraint that decides a great room order. Any roller shade over 100 inches high moves to the 43 mm tube and our large squared cassette, which reaches 118 inches wide and 120 inches high. Cellular on a bead chain reaches 157 inches high and 197 inches wide in a single shade. Woven wood reaches 118 inches high on clutch and motorized lifts but 106 inches on cordless, and tops out at 96 inches wide, with wider openings covered by several shades on one headrail up to 118 inches in total.

For the upper tier, a motor is the practical answer. A motorized roller needs 8 to 10 inches more minimum width than a manual one, starting at 20 1/8 inches on our 3 1/2 inch squared cassette and 20 1/2 inches on our smaller and large squared cassettes. Motorized cellular starts at 23 inches wide and stops at 79 inches high, so it suits the lower windows rather than a tall upper pane. The standard battery motor can be solar powered, which saves taking down a high shade to charge it. Each motor stores six positions, and one multi-channel remote with up to 16 channels can run every shade in the room together or one at a time.

Measuring and installing them yourself

Measure every window on its own. Take the width at the top, middle and bottom and use the smallest, rounded down to the nearest 1/8 inch, then measure the height on both sides. For an inside mount on cellular the shade is built about 1/4 inch narrower than the opening. For an outside mount, add about 3 7/8 inches to width and height. Woven wood needs at least 1 5/8 inches of frame depth to mount inside, and 2 5/8 inches to sit flush.

Roller shades hang from a cassette bracket fixed with a 6 mm drill bit, with screw holes marked at 1.1 inch spacing and drywall and masonry anchors both in the box. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes. On a wide shade or a high install, use all four. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press back until it clicks, and check that the top and rear have both locked before you let go. Set the motor's upper and lower limits carefully, since each can be fine tuned only once.

Order samples and hold them against the glass in the brightest part of the afternoon, on both tiers, before you choose.