Most people pick a blind the wrong way round, and I say that with some sympathy because it is the natural way to do it. They see a fabric they like in a showroom, they get attached to it, and then they try to make it fit the window they have got at home, which turns out to be a triangle over the stairs, or a roof lantern, or four metres of bi-folds. It does not fit. It was never going to fit, and somebody should have said so in the showroom.
We make blinds for a living, and a lot of what we make goes on the awkward windows that other companies have already turned down, so a fair amount of my week is spent unpicking decisions that got made in that order. What follows is the order I wish people used instead. Start with the window. Let the window choose. There are four styles here and each one exists because some particular kind of window insisted on it.
1. Motorised honeycomb, for the windows that are nothing special
For an ordinary rectangular window this is where I would start, and in most rooms it is where I would stop as well.
The whole idea is in the cell. The fabric gets folded into honeycomb pockets and every pocket holds a layer of still air against the glass. Still air is hopeless at moving heat about, which sounds like a detail until you have sat in a north facing bedroom in January with a flat blind down and felt the cold rolling off the window regardless. The honeycomb keeps an insulating layer sitting there. A flat fabric simply cannot do that, whatever the brochure claims about thickness, and I have had that argument with a few people over the years.
Have it motorised while you are at it. My reasons are practical rather than gadgety. A dangling chain on a tall stairwell window is annoying on a good day, and with small children in the house it is a hazard, the looped cord regulations did not appear out of nowhere. Ours run on Somfy motors, quiet ones, in two builds, the 25mm Sona System for standard windows and the 45mm Sona Pro System for the tall drops where a thinner cell starts to bow out in the middle. Both talk to Alexa, Google Home, Control4, KNX and Crestron, so the blinds end up on the same app as the lighting, which is what people ask us for now anyway.
One honest caveat. If the window in question is the little square one in the downstairs loo, buy a plain roller and forget I said anything. It will do the job perfectly well and I would rather the money went on the windows that actually need it.
2. Anything with a point in it, and you are into shaped work
The people who ring us about a triangular gable window have almost always been told no three or four times already. We hear it most weeks. I do understand why, a triangle is genuinely awkward to build a blind for, so most of the trade quietly does not bother with them.
The problem underneath is simple enough. Put a rectangular blind on an angled window and you are left with a wedge of bare glass running along the slope. That wedge, naturally, is exactly where the low evening sun comes through, straight across the sofa, and so somebody has paid good money for a blind that misses the entire point of owning one.
What works is building the thing for the specific window in front of you. Adapt something that nearly fits and you get a blind that nearly works, which is not the same as working. We measure the angles ourselves, on site, because every opening turns out a little different from what the drawings promised. Then SonaApex gets built to those measured angles, with a mechanism that keeps the fabric pressed to the sloped edge the whole way up and the whole way back down again. That mechanism, the light gap control, is the part we hold the patent on. It is also the part the cheap shaped blinds get wrong. They cover the middle well enough and then leak light right at the point, which is the one place anybody was ever going to look.
A bit of advice if there is apex glazing anywhere on the drawings. Sort the blind while the electrician is still on site. First fix is easy, it costs nothing extra at that stage. Chasing cable through finished plaster afterwards is miserable work and it never quite looks right again.
3. Glass above your head has to be held, not hung
Every blind on a wall is quietly leaning on gravity. Gravity keeps the fabric flat and drags the hem downwards, and nobody gives it a thought because it simply always works. Tip that glass towards the horizontal, which is what a rooflight is, and the arrangement falls apart. Put an ordinary blind up there and by the end of one summer it has bellied out, wandered sideways and settled in a corner. I have been called out to enough of them that I could describe the pattern with my eyes shut.
So overhead the fabric has to be held rather than hung. SonaSky runs the cloth inside a tensioned track down either side and that track holds it flat to the glass at any pitch you like. A steep loft skylight, a nearly flat lantern over a kitchen island, the track does not much care either way. It sits on the same Somfy platform as everything else we make, so the lantern and the bedroom honeycombs and the gable blind all answer to one app rather than three remotes rattling around in a drawer.
Something I have learned the hard way. On a large roof lantern the blind is the last thing anyone specifies and the first thing the client notices, generally about mid afternoon on the first properly hot Saturday in July. Decide it early and spare yourself that phone call.
4. With doors, the thing has to let them open
One rule settles everything where doors are concerned. The doors have to carry on working. Any blind sitting in their path is the wrong blind, no matter how well it showed up on the sample board.
Three answers get through that rule intact. A slim blind on each leaf, folding back as the leaf folds. A single blind drawing right off to one side and clear of the opening. Or shading outside the glass altogether, an awning or a pergola, and on a hot south facing run that outside option is very often the better piece of engineering full stop, since it stops the heat before it ever arrives at the glass.
The measurement that decides it is a dull one. How much clear recess is left once the doors are stacked back. Ten minutes with a tape measure and half your options rule themselves out, so do that before anybody falls in love with a fabric, because the recess is not interested in the fabric.
So which one do you actually want
Let the window pick, that is the whole of it. A square window wants a honeycomb, motorised if it is tall or if there are several of them. Anything carrying a point or an angle wants SonaApex, and I say that plainly, nothing else does that job properly. Glass overhead wants SonaSky on its tensioned tracks. Doors want a blind per leaf, or a side stacking blind, or shade outside.
Most houses are not one of these problems though. The typical project we quote has all four running at once, which is the real argument for putting the lot on one motorised system with scenes and timers rather than four separate systems that ignore each other completely. SonaApex, SonaSky and our electric skylight blinds were built to be exactly that, one platform.
If a particular window has you stuck, send a photograph and rough sizes over to contact@sonashades.com. The awkward ones are the ones we enjoy.
