Lake House Shades & Blinds

A lake house is built around the view. The main room faces the water through a wall of glass, the light comes off the lake as well as the sky, and by late afternoon the glare can make the best seat in the house the hardest one to sit in. The bedrooms have the opposite problem: early sun over the water and long summer evenings, with guests who want to sleep in. Lake house shades and blinds need to keep the view by day, darken the bedrooms, and suit a home that may sit empty between visits. Every shade here is made to the width and height you measure and shipped direct to you.

Shades for the view, the bedrooms and the bunk room

Solar shades are the starting point for the room that looks out at the lake. They are screens rated by openness: 1% blocks about 80% of the light, 3% about 70%, 5% about 60% and 10% about 50%. A tighter screen blocks more of the light coming off the water; a more open one lets more of the room stay bright.

Woven wood shades bring the bamboo, jute and reed texture that suits a lake house, in a living room, dining area or bedroom. Add a light filtering liner for privacy or a blackout liner, rated 100% blackout, for sleep. Keep them out of bathrooms and any room that stays damp, since natural fibers are not suited to high humidity.

Blackout roller shades handle the main bedrooms with a simple, flat face that rolls up into a cassette. ZeroGlow is our answer for guest rooms and bunk rooms. It is a 25 mm blackout cellular shade held inside an edge-to-edge frame, cordless, and it presses into the window opening with no drilling, which suits a second home where you would rather not put holes in the trim. Choose the fabric from six colors (white, black, beige, light gray, dark gray and straw) and the frame from three, and set it to travel up and down the glass or side to side.

Widths, openness and the frame

Fabric type sets how wide a single roller shade can go. On our CB-235 squared cassette, blackout and solar fabrics reach 94 1/2 inches wide and light filtering reaches 98 3/8 inches, because heavier goods are milled on narrower rolls. For tall lake-facing glass, any roller shade over 100 inches high moves to the 43 mm tube on the large cassette, which reaches 118 inches wide and 120 inches high.

Woven wood reaches 96 inches wide on every lift system, and a wider opening takes two or more shades on one headrail, up to 118 inches in total. Cordless woven wood stops at 106 inches high, while clutch loop and motorized reach 118 inches.

ZeroGlow is built to your opening in inches or millimetres. For a house you visit on weekends, a motor on the big shades lets you close the view windows from a remote, a wall switch or an app, with Alexa, Google Home and Apple HomePod supported.

Measuring and installing them yourself

Measure every window separately and label each one by room. For an inside mount, take the width at the top, middle and bottom and use the smallest figure, rounded down to the nearest 1/8 inch, then measure the height on both sides and use the smaller. Woven wood needs at least 1 5/8 inches of frame depth to mount inside.

Roller shades hang on a cassette bracket: drill with a 0.2 inch (6 mm) bit, use the anchor that matches your wall, hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, and press back until it clicks. ZeroGlow needs no drill at all. Lay the frame on a soft, flat surface and join the corners, run the rubber weather strip around the outside edges of the frame, then set it in the opening and press the front of the frame into place.

For a lake house look, keep the palette close to the landscape: sand, stone and straw on the shades, with frames and cassettes matched to the window trim. Order samples, try them at the brightest hour, and send us your sizes.