Not curtains: soft blind options

As mentioned before there has been a roller blind revolution in window furnishings in recent years. Roller blind fabrics have appeared in a new variety of textures and designs, and roller blinds would be the least expensive product to custom manufacture, even cheaper than vertical blinds. Roller blinds rule!, for now.

These factors combined with the ‘clean lines’ fashion has seen roller blinds installed everywhere in new multi-residential projects. For specialist ‘blind manufacturers’ roller blinds have replaced vertical blinds which had for many years dominated the cheap end of the market. Vertical blinds, now long out of favour with decorators and available only in very limited fabric options, have eventually fallen out of fashion even with the cheaper end of the market. (But watch this space – see later.)

Roller blinds took their place. However it was soon discovered how impractical roller blinds are for large openings and especially large sliding doors. Hence the panel blind, see later.

There is much expertise and experience required in successfully using soft furnishings fabrics for roman blinds and panelblinds, but the benefits are many. Many spectacular print designs are perfect for these blinds. You can in effect create a piece of ‘wall art’.

For both blind types we use the spline lath system incorporating the fabric into the laths for plainer types of fabrics to make ‘grooves’ across the blind to give an appealing definition to the segments of the blinds in the down position, and also thus visually linking panelblinds with romans in the one setting. This system also allows for very large blinds without unsightly seams in the fabric, the joins are concealed in the laths.

There is always an option for the plain panel of fabric look, without the ‘grooves’ if preferred. For patterned fabrics there is sometimes the need for this style of separate laths attached at the rear so the pattern is not broken up.

Our standard hardware is top of the range Acmeda chain control. There are many traps with cheaper versions, such as the adhesive velcro peeling out of the headrail in Queensland’s heat & humidity. This will not happen with Acmeda as the heading attachment is solid PVC incorporated in the headrail, not adhesive tape.

Motorisation is now available also with the Acmeda hardware with the motor fitting within the same slim compact headrail that is used for chain control, and can be battery operated or mains powered.

The track at the top is a multi-channel aluminium extrusion which is not particularly attractive when the panels are drawn back. Although many blind manufacturers supply the product like that as complete, there have been recent attempts to make the hardware more attractive or to cover it with something like the extruded pelmet section in plastic that used to be available for vertical blinds – not nice.

Andersons’ panel blinds include a lightly padded fascia or mini-pelmet of 120mm depth, fully covered in the actual blind fabric. This fascia is included in the price for panel blinds, but for roller blinds it is offered as an option as for example with bonded roller blinds in our next section.

Chain control operation is now the norm in place of the traditional spring operation, as with the standard roller blinds in stiffened fabric, also known as ‘holland blinds’ in the industry by the way, whilst we are mentioning terminology.

Be aware with bonded blinds, if they will not fit within the window reveal, which is the most common installation, and they need to be mounted on face, i.e. on the architrave or on the wall above the window then the bonded fabric needs to fall over the back of the roller ‘back roll’ so that the blind hangs neat to the architrave or wall, say 20-30mm away as opposed to say 70-90mm away when the fabric comes over the front of the roller, ’front roll’.

Front roll is standard for reveal fit blinds because you see the face fabric without the roller on view. But back roll is necessary for a face fit situation to avoid large unsightly gaps between the blind fabric and the wall or architrave.

For face fit therefore, the reverse side of the blind fabric is on show, which is actually the plain fabric bonded to the back of the face fabric. For this reason a fascia covered in the same fabric as the blind, as mentioned above, is necessary.

This same situation occurs with the new generation block-out roller blind fabrics, which are acrylic coated. The reverse side of the fabric does not match the front, and being on show for face fit installation, needs to be covered by a fascia.

They are a cross between a blind and a curtain, drawing up from the bottom to the top, but draping like a curtain and finished at the bottom with scallops. Variants are the London blind which finishes the scalloped bottom with ‘wings’ at the outsides, and the festoon blind which is usually in a sheer or lace, and whereas the Austrian has gathers in the bottom section only to form scallops, the festoon blind has gathers forming panels of scallops all the way up to the heading.

Now, be warned, there is a great profusion of terminology in the industry around these products. I blame the Victorians in the soft furnishings industry. We all know Victorians generally get most things wrong – so let’s stick with Andersons’ terminology.