The best blind, by what you are actually trying to fix

Why “best” has to be answered per problem

Ask which car is best and the sensible answer is another question. Window coverings are the same and the trade mostly pretends otherwise, because the person answering usually has one product they would rather sell.

There are six things a covering is judged on and no product wins more than two:

How much light it stops. How much view it keeps. How much heat it holds.

How much of the window it eats when open. How much attention it needs. What it costs per window.

They trade against each other. Stopping light means giving up view. Holding heat means adding thickness. Keeping the whole window means giving up the fabric fold that makes a room look furnished.

So the useful version of this page is a list of problems with one named winner each, and the conditions under which that winner is the wrong answer. Every recommendation below is followed by where it fails, because a recommendation without that is an advertisement.

The short answer, in one table

The problem you have	The winner	Where it is wrong
Room too bright to sleep in	Blackout roller, side channels if it must be total	Makes the room dark all day; no view at any setting
Cold room, high heating bill	Double cell cellular shade	You lose the view entirely when it is down
Glare but you want the view	Screen roller, open weave	Gives no privacy after dark — the room is lit from inside
Room is dim and needs every bit of light	Venetian, tilted up	Most surfaces to dust of anything we fit
Sliding or patio door	Vertical or panel track	Neither is a blackout product
Widest window in the house	Roller	No fabric fold, so the room reads plainer
Room that should look furnished	Roman shade or curtains	Stack eats the top of the glass permanently
Kitchen or bathroom	Faux wood or aluminium venetian	Heavier than timber on a wide opening
Renting, or cannot drill	Inside-reveal or tension-fitted	Rules out anything oversized or outside-mounted
Lowest cost per window	Plain roller	Nothing — this is a real answer, not a consolation

The rest of this page is why.

Best for darkness: a blackout roller

One flat opaque plane, close to the glass, with no slats to leak between and no folds to hold a gap. Nothing else starts from a better position.

The part worth understanding is that the fabric is only about sixty per cent of the result. A blackout cloth stops essentially all light through itself; what is left is the perimeter — the outline where blind meets opening. In a room that is otherwise unlit, that outline is visible and it is enough to see by.

Closing it means trapping the edges rather than choosing a better cloth. That is equipment, it costs money, and it is a decision rather than an upgrade. The full argument, including the gap at the top which behaves differently from the sides, is on the blackout blinds page.

Where it is wrong. It has two states and one of them is a dark room. In a bedroom that is the point. In any room used during the day it means you are choosing between full daylight and none, which is why living rooms specified with bedroom fabric are the most common thing we are called back to change.

Best for warmth: a double cell cellular shade

The only common product whose performance claim is structural rather than marketing. The honeycomb cross-section traps a layer of still air between the room and the glass, and still air is the insulator — the fabric is just what holds it in place.

That makes it the one product where “energy saving” means something specific. It also works in both directions: the same trapped layer slows summer heat coming in through a south window.

A double cell has two air pockets rather than one and is meaningfully better in a cold room. On a Toronto window facing a February night, this is the product.

Where it is wrong. Down, it is opaque — you get warmth or view, not both. And on a very wide opening the cells compress unevenly over years. The detail is on the cellular shades page.

Best for keeping the view: a screen roller

The one people are most often talked out of and most often should have.

A screen fabric is a woven mesh rated by openness — a one per cent weave is nearly opaque, a ten per cent weave is close to a net curtain. Lowered fully, an open screen cuts the direct beam and the glare while leaving the street, the garden and the sky readable through it. The room stays daylit. Nothing is half-mast.

For a living room, a home office or any window with a view worth having, this is usually the correct answer and it is rarely the one offered first.

Where it is wrong. After dark it does nothing. A lit room behind a screen fabric is visible from outside, and the tighter weave that fixes that is the one that costs you the daytime view. A screen roller in a room used in the evening wants a second layer — which is the honest reason living rooms end up with curtains as well.

Best for a dim room: a venetian

Every other product on this page answers “how much of this window should be covered”. A venetian answers a different question: “where should the light that comes in go”.

Tilt the slats up and daylight is thrown onto the ceiling, which re-radiates it into the room. You get a bright room and no glare from the same window at the same hour — and privacy without darkness, because a slat angled upward is opaque from below.

In a north-facing room, a basement, or any room whose complaint is that there is never enough light, nothing else comes close.

Where it is wrong. Fifty or sixty slats is fifty or sixty surfaces, and dust lands on all of them. This is the honest cost of the mechanism and no fabric treatment changes it. If nobody in the house will run a cloth over them twice a year, we would rather point you at a roller than sell you something you will resent.

Best for a sliding door: a vertical or a panel track

A door is not a window with a handle. It moves, it is walked through, and whatever covers it has to get out of the way completely and then come back.

Vertical blinds hang in vanes that rotate for light and stack to one side for access. Unfashionable and still the most practical answer on a wide slider.

Panel tracks are the same idea in broad flat panels — fewer, larger, calmer-looking, and they suit a modern room better.

Where both are wrong. Neither is a blackout product: light passes between vanes and around panels by design. A patio door in a room that must go dark is a different problem, and the options are on the patio door page.

Best for the biggest window: whatever stacks smallest

On the largest window in a house the deciding number is one nobody asks about, and they notice it forever afterwards.

Every covering parks somewhere when it is open. A roller rolls to a tube and a cassette — around fifty millimetres. A venetian compresses to a pile of slats. A roman gathers to roughly a fifth of its drop, so a two-metre drop parks about forty centimetres of fabric across the top of the glass.

On a small window that band is invisible. On a three-metre living room window it is a permanent horizontal bar sitting exactly where the most useful daylight enters — the light that arrives high, hits the ceiling and reaches the far side of the room.

That is not an argument that rollers are better. It is an argument that on your biggest window, stack is a specification and should be on the quote.

Best if you rent

The question is answered by your tenancy agreement before it is answered by taste, and it eliminates categories rather than ranking them.

If you can drill and make good. Anything is available. Inside-reveal mounting leaves four small holes in timber rather than in a painted wall, and it is the tidiest thing to hand back.

If you cannot drill at all. Tension-fitted and no-tools products exist and they are genuinely limited — narrow openings, light fabrics, no oversizing. Sold honestly they are useful; sold as equivalent to a fitted blind they are not.

Either way, size to the reveal and not to the wall. An outside-mounted blind made wider than its opening is the right answer in a house you own and a bad investment in one you are leaving, because it will not fit the next window you own.

Best value: a plain roller, and that is not a consolation

Worth saying plainly, because the whole shape of a page like this pushes toward the expensive answer.

A plain roller in a mid-range fabric, cordless, made to the actual opening and fitted properly, is a genuinely good window covering. It does the job, it lasts, and on most windows in most houses nobody would specify anything else if the budget were unlimited but the requirement were honest.

What the extra money buys, in the order it is worth having it:

A better control. Cordless instead of a chain, or a motor where the window is used daily and awkward to reach. This changes how it feels to live with more than any fabric does.

A better fabric. Thicker, more stable, less prone to curling at the edge over years of sun.

A cassette. Hides the roll and stops dust settling on the tube.

Side channels, if and only if the room must be truly dark.

What it stops buying anything: decoration. A valance, a printed pattern, a branded fabric name. If a quote is expensive and does not name at least one item from the first list, that is the question to ask.

How to use this page in five minutes

Name the problem in one sentence, out loud. Not “we need blinds for the living room” but “the sun lands on the television between four and half five in September” or “the back bedroom is freezing and the window is original”.

The named problem points at a row in the table. The row names a product. The paragraph tells you where that product fails, and if that failure describes your room, go back a row.

Then the only thing left is the window itself — how square it is, how deep the reveal is, what is above it, which way it opens. That part cannot be done from a page, and it is why the measure is free.

If you would rather start from the mechanisms than from the problems, the companion piece is the types of blinds, which walks the same ground in the other direction.