Mid Century Modern Shades & Blinds

Mid century rooms are built around warm wood, low horizontal lines and a lot of glass, and that combination is unforgiving on window coverings. Anything fussy fights the furniture, anything cold and white kills the warmth, and the wide low windows the era favored are often too wide for a stock size. What works is a flat face, a narrow profile at the top and a material with some grain to it. Everything on this page is cut to your opening.

The shades that suit a mid century room

Woven Wood Shades are the closest match to the era's materials, woven from bamboo, jute, reed, flax, grass and ramie. Order them in Flat Fold, where the fabric flows from behind the headrail and hangs in a crisp flat plane when fully lowered, and you get the cleanest horizontal line of the three fold styles. Waterfall flows from the front of the headrail instead, so the headrail is hidden and the face reads as one continuous surface.

Light Filtering Roller Shades give you a completely flat face with a cassette that can be matched to the room. Cassette colors are white, beige, grey and black on most systems, though the CB-282 fascia comes in white and black only. Solar Shades do the same job while keeping the view through the weave. Light Filtering Roman Shades add a soft fold if the room needs something less severe, and Zebra Shades alternate sheer and solid bands that slide past each other, reading as a graphic horizontal stripe when partly open.

Sizes, cassettes and fabric widths

Cassette choice sets the profile at the top of the window. The CB-268 and CB-269 are the smallest at 75 by 75 mm. The CB-235 is 88 by 88 mm, the CB-283 large squared cassette is 106 by 106 mm, and the CB-282 fascia is a flat 94.9 by 17.5 mm face. On a low window a smaller cassette keeps more glass visible.

Light filtering fabrics run wider than blackout everywhere in the range, which suits these windows. On the CB-235 a light filtering shade reaches 98 3/8 inches wide and 137 3/4 inches high, while blackout on the same cassette stops at 94 1/2 by 118 inches. On the CB-268 light filtering reaches 96 inches and blackout stops at 86 inches, because blackout goods run on narrower rolls.

Two constraints are worth checking before you order a wide shade. If the fabric you choose is narrower than the system maximum, the fabric width becomes the maximum: Unadorned Pure at 90 inches and one Solora at 90.6 inches cannot fill a 96 inch opening on any cassette. And any shade over 100 inches high has to use the 43 mm tube and the large cassette, either the CB-282 or the CB-283, because a 38 mm tube cannot carry that drop. Woven wood caps at 96 inches wide on every operating system, with wider openings covered by multiple shades on one headrail to 118 inches total.

One more detail. Roll method can be standard, where the fabric rolls off the back of the tube and hangs close to the glass, or reverse, where it hangs off the front to clear a deep sill, a handle or a crank. Mid century sills are often deep enough to need reverse.

Measuring and installing

Roller and zebra shades mount on the cassette bracket system. Drill with a 0.2 inch, or 6 mm, bit, set the bracket screws at 1.1 inch spacing, and use the anchor type that matches your wall from the two supplied. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press it back until it clicks, confirm both the top and rear have locked, and check for looseness before letting go. For woven wood inside mount, measure the width at the top, center and bottom and use the smallest rounded down to the nearest 1/8 inch, then do the same for height. You need a minimum 1 5/8 inch frame depth, or 2 5/8 inches for a flush install.

Everything here is cut to your numbers and ships direct with brackets and hardware included. Order a few samples first if you are matching a walnut credenza.