How to choose the right Roman Blind
Choosing the right roman blinds can be challenging, with many different styles on the market. How do you choose the right roman blind?
At Blinds Downunder we’ve broken down the steps and questions to help you choose the right roman blind for your needs.
Steps for choosing a roman blind:
- Familiarise yourself with the room
- Selecting a fabric
- Blind configuration
- Blind hardware
- Budget
- Familiarise yourself with your room
Familiarise yourself with the room, have a look at colour scheme, room layout, location of daytime sun, size of the window(s)/doors and any potential obstructions around.
Our custom fit roman blinds assist with blocking out external light, reducing direct sun glare, creating privacy and can also help with managing energy efficiency.
Click image below to see energy benefits of window furnishings.
- Selecting a fabric
Blinds Downunder Roman Blind range suits a variety of applications, our fabrics offer an exciting range of colours and textures. We provide technical specifications on all the fabrics we provide. This can help you choose the best fabric for your blinds and their desired application.
When choosing your customised roman blind fabric, it is important you select the right fabric and style that will best suit your blind location, based on your room type, light requirements, privacy requirements, your internal colour schemes, design and style.
Depending on how much light you would like to enter your room and what purpose your room is used for. Different fabrics can offer different desired light settings for each room. Below we go through the two fabric types available for roman blinds.
Blockout fabrics are solid material and stop a majority of light entering your room.
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Light Filtering Fabrics allow some light to enter your room, however you may only be able to see shadows or silhouettes outside or inside your room depending on the light, day or night. Lighter fabric colours will provide greater light into your space than darker fabric colours.
How fabric selection can create better energy efficiency
Our blockout fabrics are considered the best way to reduce heat and heat loss through any external glass window or door. Our blockout fabrics, combined with screen fabrics can assist with your home energy efficiency throughout the year. Careful consideration needs to be made with roman blinds based on how much sun exposure each room may experience. A combination of blockout blinds and Light filtering blinds can meet your desired needs.
Where can I choose these Fabric Ranges?
Our range can be chosen through the roman blind section on our webpage. You may wish to view our Fabric options, go to Blind Fabrics Australia in the top right corner, you will see the roman blind samples in the dropdown. You can view here prior to heading to our roman blind selection pages.
- Blind mounting options
When considering how you would like your roman blinds to appear on your windows or doors, take note of our face fit information.We only offer face fit Roman Blinds as outlined below.
Face Fit
We only provide roman blinds as face fit option, the reason being, fabrics can have tendency to settle over time, 0-30mm approximately. Meaning over time they will not hang as nicely in a recess fitting situation. You can adjust face fitting romans in most situations, provided there is room above to lift the blind up higher.
Important notes regarding vertical Light Gaps
We recommend you order Roman blinds to be made wider than your architraves anywhere from 25mm each side up to 75mm each side, to help eliminate large amounts of light filtering through the side.Allow approximately 70-200mm if no architraves. Your headboard size will also determine how much light enters down the sides. The standard headboard size is 40mm for cord operation and 50mm for chain operation.
Headboards
Headboards come in different sizes and will be determined by if you have obstruction, an obstruction is a door handle, a window winder or an architrave. Should you choose a chain lift option, 50mm headboard will be the minimum size.
You may choose a larger headboard so you can install a face fit sunscreen blind behind your Roman Blind.
Important note on window obstructions
Obstruction with window or door height, could mean blinds may need to be mounted higher above the window or door height. Generally each Roman Blind bay is around 150mm-250mm in size. So you will need to be additional height to your roman blind.
What should I consider if I have a Large Window or door
We recommend on windows or doors larger than 2400mm width to split your roman blind into smaller blinds. On our roman blind configurator we offer side by side roman blinds as an option. Each blind works independently to one another, however helps reduces the size and pressures, that a larger single roman blind would experience. It is important to make note if roman blinds are side by side, so each bay lines up with one another.
Important note regarding Vertical gap
One downside to having side by side roman blinds is there will be a gap of approximately 10mm-15 between the internal blind, which will create a light gap down the Vertical drop.
- Blind Hardware
You can change the look of your roman blinds by changing your batten styles. This is a way to add a little bit more flare to your blinds.
We offer the traditional cord lift with white cord, Chain lift with standard colours below.We can also offer motorisation.
Our Tropicana Range is a back mounted batten and provides a clean modern look. This is the most cost effective upgrade.
Our Pacific Range is more contemporary and has a front and back batten. This is the most costly upgrade.
The standard cord control is the most cost effective Roman Blind we can provide.
The standard cord control is a pull string operation, The Budget Chain System offers a chain or motorised option and the Deluxe Chain System is chain control only.
Motorisation
Blinds Downunder also offer battery motorisation with the Budget Chain System only. Motorisation requires a battery charger to charge individual motors approximately every 3-8 months, blinds stay in their fitted position when charging. The rest of the time you can use a remote control or create automation throughout your house using a hub to raise and drop your blinds. Battery motorisation has came a long way in the last few years and creates a great option for a clean look free of blind cords.
Alpha have an app that is extremely versatile and easy to set up. It controls all Alpha motorised products individually, by area or the whole house all at once from anywhere in the world with a home internet connection. All functionality can be scheduled to operate automatically. With the Alpha Neo Link Box, you can download the free app for either android or apple and control all your devices and groups directly or through automations functions available. Alpha Neo is compatible with both Google Home and Amazon Alexa and soon with Siri.
Click Alpha remote image for further details on how the motorisation system works;
- Budget
We always recommend you choose the best Fabric type for your purpose. With Roman Blinds it is more important choosing Roman Blind System for Pricing purposes.
Lowest to highest
1) Cord Control
2) Budget Chain Control
3) Deluxe Chain Control.
4) Budget Chain Control (motorised)
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