Top Down Bottom Up Shades & Blinds

Top down bottom up shades solve a problem an ordinary blind can't: you want daylight coming in over the top of the window, and you want nobody on the sidewalk seeing into the room. A TDBU shade has two moving rails instead of one. Drop the top rail and light pours in across the ceiling while the bottom half stays covered. Raise the bottom rail instead and you have a conventional shade with an open view. Most customers buy these for street-facing bedrooms, ground-floor bathrooms, and front rooms where the window looks straight at a neighbor.

Which of our shades and blinds do top down bottom up

Two families in our lineup build as TDBU: cellular (honeycomb) and woven wood. Cellular is the one most people picture. We build it in three cell sizes, 25 mm, 38 mm, and 45 mm, so the shade can be scaled to the window rather than the other way round. The larger cells carry taller drops and read as a heavier, more architectural shade; the small cell suits shallow frames and modest windows.

On 38 mm and 45 mm cellular, TDBU is available with a manual dual bead chain or with dual motors. Dual is the operative word. Both rails move independently, so each one needs its own mechanism, and a motorized TDBU carries two motors rather than one. That is a real premium over a single-motor shade, and it is the reason a motorized TDBU costs what it does. The 25 mm cell is built cordless.

Woven wood top down bottom up

Woven wood TDBU gives you the same two-rail behavior in a natural material: bamboo, jute, reed, and grass weaves. Pair it with a valance. The headrail on a TDBU shade carries visible hardware, and the valance is what turns it into a finished window rather than a mechanism. Valance height follows the height of the shade, and returns are included on request.

One constraint worth knowing before you configure: woven wood TDBU takes attached liners only. A liner is what closes off the open weave and turns a decorative shade into a functional one, and we offer it either permanently attached behind the fabric or as a separate movable layer on its own control. The movable version needs a deeper headrail to house a second mechanism, and that space is what the TDBU rails already occupy. If you want TDBU, the liner is attached, which is also the cleaner look from inside the room.

Sizing, and the width question

Most of our roller and woven wood systems stop at 96" wide. A wider opening isn't the end of it: we build multiple shades on a single continuous headrail up to 118" total, so a wide window reads as one covering rather than two. Woven wood holds to 96" on every operating system, and a common valance also caps at 96". Cellular reaches much further. A dual bead chain TDBU runs to 197" wide, while a motorized cellular is height-limited instead, at 79" on the larger cells.

Every shade on this page is made to your measurements, in your fabric, with your choice of control. Order a sample first if color matters; screens are a guide, not a match.