Blinds in Vaughan

The city of shapes

Every place we work has its own recurring problem. In Vaughan it is that a large share of the windows are not rectangles, and a blind is a rectangle.

Drive through Patterson, Vellore Village or the newer parts of Woodbridge and count the front elevations with an arched head over the door, a half-round above a first-floor window, a transom band running above the main glazing, or a gable end glazed to follow the roof pitch. It is the prevailing architectural language here, and it was drawn by people thinking about the elevation rather than about what would eventually hang inside it.

That is not a complaint. Those windows are the best thing about these houses. But it does mean the first conversation at a Vaughan measure is almost never about fabric — it is about which of these openings can be covered in a way that works, which can be covered in a way that merely looks covered, and which are better left alone.

Arches: three answers, and only one of them moves

An arch over a front door or above a first-floor window has exactly three honest treatments.

A shaped fixed panel. Cut to the curve, held in the opening, and it does not move. It covers the glass completely, it looks intentional, and it is the only option that genuinely follows the shape. What you give up is operation: it is a permanent filter, not a blind. On a foyer arch that exists to put light into a hall, that is usually exactly right.

Stop at the spring line. A conventional blind fills the rectangular part below where the curve begins, and the arch stays bare above it. This is the cheapest and by far the most common result. It works when the arch is small relative to the window and when the light coming through the arch alone is not the problem. It looks wrong when the arch is large, because you have drawn a hard horizontal line across a shape whose whole point is that it has no hard horizontal line.

Mount above the whole thing. A single blind on brackets fixed above the top of the arch, dropping down over the shape entirely. When it is down, the window is covered. When it is up, the arch is visible again. What you accept is a headbox sitting above the arch, which on a two-storey foyer is often invisible from below and on a low ceiling is very visible indeed.

There is a fourth thing that gets sold and should not be: a fan-shaped pleated blind that opens and closes across the arch. They exist, they are mechanically clever, and in our experience they sag within a couple of years and never sit the same way twice. We do not fit them.

Angled glass, and why gravity is the problem

A gable end glazed to follow the roof, or a family-room window whose head runs up with a vaulted ceiling, is a different problem from an arch, and a harder one.

Every ordinary blind works because gravity pulls the fabric down flat against a vertical plane. On a raked window the plane is not vertical, so gravity pulls the fabric away from the glass. It hangs plumb while the window leans, and the gap at the bottom grows with the angle.

That leaves two workable answers. A shaped fixed panel again — cut to the triangle or the trapezoid, held in place, permanent. Or a cellular blind running on side tracks that physically hold it against the slope, which does move, and is the only moving product we will specify on a rake.

Anything else is a blind that will hang in mid-air, and the fact that somebody is willing to sell it does not make it work.

Transoms: usually a separate decision

The band of small windows above the main glazing is common here and it is worth deciding separately rather than swallowing it into the window below.

Running a single blind over both means the brackets go above the transom, which puts the roll high on the wall or into the ceiling and makes the whole covered area taller than the room’s proportions want. It also means every time you want to shade the main window you also lose the transom, which is often the only thing lighting the back of the room in the morning.

Two blinds — one on the window, a small one on the transom — cost more and look considered. Leaving the transom bare costs nothing and is frequently the right call, in particular in a room that faces north where the transom is contributing light and nothing else.

The exception is a bedroom. A transom above a bedroom window is a light leak that no amount of care on the main blind will fix, and there the small second blind is not optional.

The scale problem: big rooms, big spans

Vaughan houses run large, and width brings its own engineering that has nothing to do with shape.

A roller tube has to carry its own weight and the weight of the fabric across the span without bowing. Past a point that depends on tube diameter and cloth weight, the centre sags, the bottom bar stops sitting level, and the blind looks wrong even though every measurement was right. The answers are a larger-diameter tube, a heavier bottom bar, or splitting the opening into two blinds sharing a bracket line with the seam landing on a mullion where the eye already expects an interruption.

The same applies to verticals and to wide cellular blinds, and it is the reason a wide blind is not simply a narrow blind with more material in it. If a supplier quotes a four-metre roller without asking about the tube, that is worth noticing.

Two-storey foyers, and whether the window has a job

Nearly every larger house here has a window that exists for the elevation rather than for a room: the tall glass over the front door, the window following the stair.

The question we ask about those is whether it has a job. If the hall is uncomfortably bright in the afternoon, or the sun is landing on a floor finish that will fade, then it has a job and it needs something that moves — which at that height means a motor, because a bottom bar twelve feet up is not reachable and a pole is a device people use twice and then leave in a cupboard.

If it is simply an architectural window that nobody has ever wished were darker, a fixed shaped panel or nothing at all is the honest answer, and it saves the most expensive line on the quote.

We would rather ask than assume, because this is the single window where the difference between the right answer and the wrong one is the largest number on the page.

Kleinburg and the older streets

Kleinburg village and the older parts of Woodbridge are the exception to everything above: smaller houses, older frames, rectangular openings, and reveals deep enough to take an inside mount and hide the headrail completely.

Those get measured the way any older opening does — six numbers per window and both diagonals, because a frame that has been in place fifty or eighty years has usually moved a little, and a product ending in a rigid bar will show the movement as a widening line of light along the sill.

The pleasant part of that work is that the answer is usually simple. A deep reveal, a square-enough opening and a room with normal proportions is a window where almost any product can be made to look right, and the decision goes back to being about the room rather than about the geometry.

The towers at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre

The newest category, and it behaves like downtown rather than like the rest of the city: floor-to-ceiling glass, minimal reveal, bulkheads along the window wall, and a building with rules.

Depth is the constraint, so plain rollers and honeycombs dominate. The building will generally want a certificate of insurance naming the corporation and a booked service elevator, and many specify what the window may look like from outside — a rule about the backing, satisfied by almost any range, but worth reading rather than guessing.

Templating a curve, which is not the same as measuring one

A shaped window cannot be described by a width and a drop, so the visit for one is a different procedure and it takes longer.

An arch is defined by three things: the span at the spring line, the rise from that line to the crown, and whether the curve is a true segment of a circle or an ellipse. Those sound interchangeable and they are not — an elliptical head cut as a circular one is wrong by a few millimetres at the shoulders, which is exactly where the eye lands. A builder’s drawing will often say “arched”; the window itself will tell you which kind.

For anything irregular — a trapezoid following a roof pitch, a head that is neither a clean arch nor a clean angle — the measurement is a physical template rather than a set of numbers. Card, held against the opening, cut back until it sits inside the reveal, marked and taken away. It is old-fashioned and there is nothing better.

That is the practical reason we would rather see a shaped window than be told about it on the phone. Two people can describe the same arch three different ways, and the piece of card cannot.

The advice we give most often here

Decide the shapes first and the rectangles afterwards.

The shaped windows are where the money is, where the constraints are real, and where a wrong decision is permanent. The ordinary bedroom windows will still be ordinary next month and almost any competent answer will serve them. Working the other way round — doing the easy rooms, then arriving at the foyer arch with the budget spent — is the sequencing mistake we see most often in this city, and it is the one that leaves the best window in the house bare.

Last updated 9 August 2026.