Privacy Shades & Blinds

Privacy is two problems described with one word. By day the issue is a sightline from the street into a lit room, and most fabrics handle it. After dark it reverses: your room is the lit one, and a fabric that screened you at noon can show silhouettes at nine in the evening. The right answer depends on which hours actually bother you.

Which shades and blinds give you privacy

Blackout roller and blackout cellular shades are the answer when night privacy is the real complaint. Our blackout fabrics are specified at 100% blackout, so there is no view through them in either direction at any hour.

Light filtering roller and light filtering cellular shades are the daytime answer. They pass daylight while closing the sightline in, which suits a living room or kitchen you want screened rather than shut down. Read the shading figure rather than the name: our light filtering roller fabrics run from roughly 45% to 70% shading depending on the series, and that range is visible in the room.

Woven wood shades are the option where privacy is a liner decision. On their own the weaves are about 50% see-through. A light filtering liner takes that to roughly 70%, and a blackout liner gives you 100% blackout in nine colours. The liner goes on both the shade and the valance, so the finished shade reads as one piece.

Zebra shades sit between the two, with alternating sheer and solid bands that line up or offset as you adjust the shade. A cellular shade in a top down bottom up build does something similar: lowering the top rail brings daylight in over the shade while the bottom stays closed at eye level.

Openness, liners and the sizes each system reaches

Openness is set by the fabric, not the hardware. On the natural side the liner tiers above are the whole story. On roller fabrics shading runs by series, with sunscreen goods specified by openness instead: a 1% screen is rated at 80% shading, 3% at 70%, 5% at 60% and 10% at 50%.

Size limits move with both fabric and lift, and blackout is the tighter of the two. On our squared and round cassettes a light filtering roller reaches 96 inches wide while blackout on the same hardware stops at 86 inches, because the heavier goods are milled on narrower rolls. On the larger squared cassette those become 98 3/8 inches and 94 1/2 inches. Fabric roll width overrides the system maximum, so a fabric milled at 90 inches cannot fill a 96 inch opening on any cassette. Woven wood caps at 96 inches wide on every operating system.

Minimum width matters on a narrow window. A manual roller starts at 11 3/4 inches, cordless roller needs 19 3/4 inches, and cordless cellular is the forgiving one at 12 inches.

Measuring and installing them yourself

Measure the opening itself rather than an existing blind, and measure every window separately even where they look identical. For an inside mount, take 1/4 inch off the measured width to clear the frame. For an outside mount, add roughly 3 7/8 inches to both width and height so the shade overlaps the opening and closes the light gap. That is the version to choose if a streetlight is the reason you are buying.

Fitting is a bracket job. You need a 6 mm drill bit, the brackets mark at 1.1 inch screw spacing, and two types of expansion anchor ship in the box so you can match the anchor to your wall. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes and two screws on opposite sides hold fine on a sound wall. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press back until it clicks, then confirm both top and rear have locked.

Order samples before you commit, because the difference between a 50% and a 70% shading fabric is hard to judge from a photo. Cordless lifts have no loose cords, worth choosing in a home with a child or a pet. Everything here is made to measure, shipped direct, and carries a limited lifetime warranty against defects.