Roman Shades & Blinds for French Doors

French doors bring a lot of glass into a room, and because the glass is in the door, whatever covers it has to move with the door every time it swings. Curtains drag and tangle on the handle. Roman shades and blinds for French doors give each door a covering of its own, a soft fabric or natural woven face that folds up neatly when you want light and drops flat over the glass when you want privacy. Every shade is made to measure for your doors and shipped direct to you.

Roman shade options for French doors

Light filtering roman shades are the everyday choice for doors into a garden, a patio or a dining room. They soften daylight and screen the view in while the room stays bright. Blackout roman shades suit French doors that open off a bedroom, where early morning light through the door glass is the problem.

Woven wood roman shades bring natural texture to doors in a family room, a sunroom or a farmhouse kitchen. They come in three fold styles. Flat fold hangs in a crisp flat plane when lowered, with the lift chains at the front, which suits a door that is mostly kept closed. Waterfall flows from the front of the headrail for a smooth continuous face. Hobbled holds soft cascading folds. Woven wood with no liner is roughly 50 percent see-through, so add a light filtering liner for daytime privacy or a blackout liner to close the glass off fully.

All three can be ordered cordless, which keeps loose cords away from a door handle and from children and pets, or motorized, with Matter for Apple Home, Zigbee for selected Echo devices, or a standard motor with a hub.

Fitting a narrow door leaf

Each leaf of a French door is narrow, so the minimum width of the lift matters more here than the maximum. On woven wood:

• Clutch and loop builds from 11 3/4 inches wide.
• Standard DC motor builds from 12 3/4 inches, which makes it the motor that suits a narrow leaf.
• Cordless needs at least 19 3/4 inches, and wand control 24 5/8 inches.
• Lithium ion and AC motors need 25 1/4 inches, because the motor has to fit inside the headrail.

Every woven wood system reaches 96 inches wide, and the minimum height is 18 inches. Height is rarely a limit on a door: cordless reaches 106 inches and the other systems 118 inches.

Depth matters too, because a door has to open past walls and furniture. Woven wood headrails are 1 5/8 inches deep on cordless and 2 inches on clutch and motorized. Fabric roman shades are built in a squared cassette, either 3 1/2 inches or 2 15/16 inches square, so check the space between the door glass and the handle before you choose.

Measuring and installing it yourself

Treat each leaf as its own shade. Most people mount on the door itself, above the glass, so the shade travels with the door. Measure the glass area you want covered, then add a little overlap on each side so light does not leak around the edges.

For a woven wood shade mounted inside a deep frame, measure the width at the top, middle and bottom and use the smallest, then the height on each side and use the smallest, both rounded down to the nearest 1/8 inch. The frame needs at least 1 5/8 inches of depth. Give us the exact figures; the factory takes its own 1/4 inch off the width.

Fabric roman shades hang on two cassette brackets. Drill with a 6 mm (0.2 inch) bit, set the screws at 1.1 inch spacing, and choose the anchor that suits the surface. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes, and on a door that opens and closes all day it is worth using all four. Hook the valance onto the bracket latch, press back until it clicks, and check that both the top and rear are locked before you let go.

Order a fabric or woven wood sample to see it against your doors in daylight, then send us the size of each leaf.