Living Room Blinds and Shades

What Are the Best Window Treatments for a Living Room?

The best living room window treatments balance four things: light control, privacy, energy efficiency and the view, and the right choice depends on which of the four matters most in your room.

Cellular shades lead on insulation. Sheer shadings and gliding panels handle large windows and patio doors. Shutters last longest, and they look as good from the street as they do from the sofa.

Start from how the room is used. A room for reading and television needs light control at particular times of day, and a room for entertaining needs to look finished with the treatments open. If the room carries a lot of glass, energy efficiency moves up the list, because glass is where a room gains and loses most of its heat. All of the options below are living room window treatments that are as fashionable as they are functional.

Cellular Shades: Superior Energy Efficiency and Style

Duette^® Honeycomb Shades Fabric: Architella^® Classic Color: London Sky

If energy efficiency is a top priority, cellular shades are the ideal living room window treatment. Duette^® Honeycomb Shades are the original honeycomb line, and their cellular design adds a layer of insulation at the window, so you reduce energy consumption and stay comfortable all year long. For more insulation again, Duette Architella^® uses a honeycomb-within-a-honeycomb construction.

The great thing about Duette shades is that they come in so many pleat sizes, colors, patterns, textures and opacities that they'll work with any living room décor. You can even combine two fabrics on the same shade for more light control.

How much insulation you get comes down to how many layers of still air the fabric holds. A single-cell shade traps one layer. A cell-within-a-cell construction traps more, which is why Architella outperforms the standard Duette line. Cell size matters too, because a deeper pleat holds more air, and a larger pleat suits the tall windows common in a living room. The trade-off is depth, since a deeper cell sits a little further off the glass.

A Modern Twist on a Classic Roman Shade

Vignette^® Roman Shades Fabric: Pampa Color: Chia

For a soft, elegant look in your living room, Roman shades are a modern and clean-lined alternative to traditional full-length draperies. Plus, they're an excellent way to add visual interest if your living room has a lot of whites and neutrals. Vignette^® Modern Roman Shades, for instance, feature luxurious colors and textures in a wide range of styles and fold sizes.

Want more light control from your living room shades? Try choosing a product that pairs a light-filtering shade with a room-darkening back panel. And since fabrics are available by the yard, you can create decorative matching pillows or other accents for upholstered furniture. As an added bonus, Vignette shades have no exposed rear cords, for enhanced child safety and a clean look from the outside.

old style changes the character of the shade more than color does. A full fold keeps soft, rounded folds even when the shade is down, and a flat fold reads crisper and more architectural against a plain wall.

Designer Screen Shades and UV Protection

Designer Screen Shades Fabric: New Orleans Color: Wrought Iron

Even on cloudy days, UV rays can fade and damage your artwork, fabrics and carpet. They can also dry out and bleach your hardwood floors and wood furniture, breaking down the paint or stain finishes and joint sealants. To protect your living room furnishings, solar shades such as Designer Screen Shades offer excellent UV protection and come in hundreds of gorgeous fabrics as well as opacities ranging from sheer to opaque and from 14% to 0% openness.

You don't have to stick to solar shades though. Virtually all Hunter Douglas shades, blinds and shutters filter at least 75% of the sun's rays when installed over double-glazed glass picture windows. That makes UV protection a question of degree rather than a question of product type.

Openness percentage is the number worth understanding before you choose a fabric. It describes how much of the weave is open, so a higher-openness fabric keeps more of the view and lets more light through, and a lower-openness fabric cuts glare harder and gives up some of the view. A 0% fabric blocks the view entirely. On a living room window you look out of every day, the higher numbers usually win.

What Works Best on Large Living Room Windows?

Luminette^® Privacy Sheers Fabric: Stria Color: Spun Sugar

Large living room windows are best served by a vertical treatment, because a vertical design spans a wide opening without the weight and stacking depth of a horizontal shade.

Luminette^® Privacy Sheers are built for exactly this, and for living room patio doors as well. Soft fabric vanes combined with vertical sheer panels give you the drama of drapes with a modern touch, and the vanes rotate, so you can hold the view or close it off without moving the panels.

Looking for something sleeker? Designed for an expansive set of windows, the clean lines of Skyline^® Gliding Window Panels definitely make a statement. Choose from an extensive collection of fashion-forward colors, patterns and textures.

The two solve the same problem differently. Luminette diffuses light across the whole opening and keeps a soft edge, and Skyline moves in flat panels that stack to one side, which suits a door you walk through every day.

Shutters: Durable and Timeless

Palm Beach^™ Polysatin^™ Shutters Color: Bright White

Like premium furniture for your family room, shutters offer the timeless beauty of rich hardwood. Plus, they look just as gorgeous from the outside of your home as they do from the inside. They're also very durable and provide great sound absorption.

You can find options ranging from real wood to hybrid shutters. At the other end sit Palm Beach^™ Polysatin^™ Shutters, which have the look of finely painted shutters but are guaranteed never to warp, crack, fade, chip, peel or discolor, even when exposed to extreme heat or humidity. Something to think about if you live in a hot climate.

Louver size is the decision most people miss. Wider louvers leave fewer horizontal lines across the window and more open view when they are tilted back, which suits the large panes of glass common in a living room.

Should You Motorize Living Room Shades?

Motorize the living room shades you either adjust every day or cannot reach easily, which in most rooms means a wide window wall, anything above a fireplace, and anything behind furniture.

PowerView^® Automation moves shades on a schedule, so they lower against the afternoon sun and open again in the evening without anyone crossing the room. On a wall of sheers or a set of gliding panels, that replaces a two-handed job done twice a day.

Motorized shades also remove the pull cord, which is the same child-safety benefit covered above, and they hold a repeatable position, so a light-filtering shade sits where you set it rather than wherever it was last pulled.

If the rest of the room is already connected, smart shades respond to the same routines as the lighting, so one evening scene can close the shades and dim the lamps together.

Can You Layer Shades and Drapery?

Yes, and in a living room the pairing does two separate jobs: the shade controls light and privacy at the glass, and the drapery frames the window and softens the room around it.

Together they give a window height and weight that a shade alone does not, which suits a room with tall ceilings or a lot of hard surfaces. Full-length drapery panels also read as furniture rather than as a window covering.

The pairing has a practical side as well. Fabric on both layers absorbs sound, and a lined panel covers the edges of the opening where a shade leaves a gap. Pairing a horizontal treatment with a vertical one is a design decision as much as a functional one, and some combinations work better than others.

Other Living Room Shade Ideas

Top treatments, such as cornices, are hard-working decorative elements. Wooden or fabric covered, they can add a finished accent to your living room shades or blinds while concealing window treatment hardware. They also help block unwanted light around the top of your window treatment and draw the eye upward, making your room seem more spacious.

Bay windows are common in living rooms and need their own approach, because each angled section takes its own treatment and the frames between them are narrow. The mounting decisions there are different from a flat wall of glass.

If the room is where you watch films or host, fabric does more than control light. Shutters and heavier fabrics absorb sound, which takes the hard edge off a room with wood floors and large panes of glass.

How Do You Measure for Living Room Shades?

Hunter Douglas shades are measured and installed by an authorized dealer rather than by you, so measuring is part of the consultation rather than a step you complete before booking one.

That matters more in a living room than anywhere else in the house, because the room usually has more than one window size and often more than one window shape. A consistent look depends on the measurements matching and on the mount being the same on every opening.

An inside mount on one window and an outside mount on the next will read as a mistake even when both are measured correctly. A local Hunter Douglas specialist can measure every opening in the room, confirm the mount, and quote the products above together.