Kitchen Window Shades & Blinds

A kitchen asks more of a window covering than any other room in the house. There is steam off the stove, splashes near the sink, cooking grease in the air, and a window that is often small, often awkwardly placed, and often directly behind a faucet you reach over several times a day. The shades and blinds on this page are the ones we would fit in our own kitchens, and the notes below are the things worth deciding before you order.

Cleanability and moisture

Over a sink or a range, choose a fabric you can wipe. Our roller, solar, and zebra shades use flat synthetic cloth that takes a damp microfiber and a little mild soap without marking, which makes them the practical choice for the window with the most cooking exposure. Cellular shades are excellent insulators and suit a kitchen that runs cold, though the honeycomb cells hold more dust and want a vacuum brush rather than a wet cloth.

Woven wood and roman shades belong on the windows that are part of the room rather than part of the work: a breakfast nook, a window across from the range, a garden window. They bring texture a flat panel can't, and away from direct steam they hold up for years.

Cordless is the right answer near counters and sinks

We recommend cordless or motorized lifts on almost every kitchen window. A hanging chain over a countertop is in the way of everything you do on it, and it is the thing a toddler pulls on while you are cooking. Cordless lifts have no loop at all: push the bottom bar up, pull it down, and it stays where you put it. Over a sink where you cannot easily reach the bottom bar, a motor is better again: a remote, a wall switch, or a schedule that opens the shade in the morning without you leaning across the basin.

Sizing a kitchen window

Kitchen windows sit at two extremes. Small windows, like a narrow slot beside a stove or a bathroom-sized window over a counter, run into minimum widths rather than maximums. Manual shades start narrower than motorized ones, because a motor lives inside the roller tube and needs roughly 8 to 10 inches more width than the same shade built manual. On a very narrow window, that decides the lift for you.

Wide windows over a sink, or a window that runs the length of a counter, run into the other end. Most of our roller and woven wood systems build to 96" wide in a single shade; past that we build multiple shades on one continuous headrail up to 118" total, so a long kitchen window still reads as a single line across the top. Blackout fabrics stop narrower than light filtering ones, 86" against 96" on some systems, which rarely matters in a kitchen, where light filtering or solar is usually what you want anyway.

If your window sits above a sink with a deep sill, measure the depth as well as the width and tell us what is in front of the glass: a faucet, a crank handle, a shelf. We will size the shade to clear it.