Kitchen blinds and curtains

Two requirements pulling opposite ways

Every other room in the house asks its window for one thing. A kitchen asks for two, and they do not agree.

The view. The window over the sink is the one people look through more than any other in the house, because standing at it is a thing that happens several times a day with nothing else to do. Anything that eats the glass costs you that.

The environment. It is also the most hostile window in the house for a covering: steam from a kettle and a hob, airborne grease that settles as a film, splash from a tap, and a surface underneath it that gets wiped down and sprayed.

So the kitchen answer is always a material that survives the second requirement while taking up as little of the first as possible. That rules out more of the range than in any other room, and it rules it out for reasons that have nothing to do with how anything looks.

What survives a kitchen, and what does not

Faux wood venetian. The one we fit most. A PVC composite slat, so moisture is irrelevant, it wipes with a damp cloth, and the tilt lets you keep the view while cutting the low sun that comes through a west kitchen window at exactly eye height. Heavier than timber for the same size, which matters only on a wide opening.

PVC or coated roller. Slimmest stack of anything — a tube and a slim cassette — so on a short wide window it keeps the most glass. Wipes completely. The trade is that a roller is all or nothing: no tilt, so you are choosing between the view and the shade rather than aiming the light.

Aluminium venetian. Underrated in this room. Modern aluminium slats are nothing like the flimsy ones people remember, they are light on a wide span, and they are completely indifferent to steam and grease.

Real timber. No, above a sink or a hob. A thin wooden slat takes up moisture unevenly across its width and cups — curves along its length — and once one slat has cupped it catches the one below and the blind stops closing cleanly. Gradual, not repairable, and no finish prevents it. It is fine on a kitchen window at the far end of a large open-plan room, well away from the cooking.

Fabric — roman, cellular, most rollers. Ages fast in steam, cannot be wiped, and holds cooking smells. There is one exception, below.

Curtains. Only away from the cooking: a garden door, a breakfast nook, a window on the opposite wall. Over a working surface they are in the way and they collect what happens on it.

The café curtain, which is the one fabric answer

Worth its own section because it is the exception and it is genuinely popular for a reason nobody explains.

A café curtain covers only the lower half of the window, hung from a rod set at mid height. It comes from exactly the situation a kitchen has: you want privacy at the level people can see in, and you want the daylight above it.

Three things it does that a full-length curtain in a kitchen cannot.

It sits above the splash line. The fabric starts at mid-window, well clear of a tap and a worktop, so it does not sit in the wet.

It keeps the top of the glass. In a kitchen the light comes in high and the privacy problem is low, so covering the bottom half solves the problem and costs almost nothing in daylight.

It suits a short wide window. A full drop on a window that is wider than it is tall looks wrong; a half drop looks intended.

What to check before choosing one: whether the window is overlooked from an angle that a half-height curtain does not cover — a first-floor window opposite, or a raised deck — because in that case the sightline comes in above the fabric and the café curtain solves nothing.

Stack, and why a roman is the wrong shape here

A kitchen window is usually wider than it is tall, and that geometry punishes any product that gathers.

A roman shade stacks its folds above the glass and that stack is roughly a fifth of the drop. On a two-metre bedroom window nobody notices. On a kitchen window that is sixty centimetres tall, a fifth is twelve centimetres of a window you spend a good deal of time looking through — and it is gone permanently, whether the blind is up or down.

The same arithmetic applies to a cellular shade, though less severely, and to a curtain heading.

A roller stacks to a tube and a bracket. A venetian stacks to a compressed pile of slats, which is more than a roller and much less than a roman. Those two are the right shape for this window, and it is a matter of geometry rather than taste.

The window that actually gets opened

Worth its own section because a kitchen window is opened more often than any other window in the house, and almost nobody accounts for it when choosing a blind.

Every other room’s window gets opened seasonally. A kitchen window gets opened because something is boiling, because the toast burned, because the room is warm from an oven — several times a day, often in a hurry, frequently with one wet hand.

That matters in a way that decides products.

A blind that has to be raised before the window will open is a blind that stays raised. An inside-mounted blind sitting close to the glass fouls a casement as soon as it swings inward, and it fouls the handle of almost anything. After the third time somebody has to lift the blind to get air into the room, the blind stops coming down at all and the money is wasted.

The handle is a measurement. A crank on an awning window, a lever on a casement, a latch on a slider — each projects into the reveal by a different amount, and each wants a different clearance. It gets measured and written down rather than discovered on fitting day.

An outside mount fixes most of this. Bringing the blind proud of the opening lets the window work underneath it, and on a kitchen window that also solves the side light leak and covers a frame that is rarely the prettiest thing in the room.

Where an inside mount is wanted for the look, the answer is a product that clears the sash entirely when raised — a roller, whose tube sits above the glass, rather than anything that leaves material hanging in the opening.

Reaching it across a worktop

The commonest practical complaint about kitchen blinds, and it is about the control rather than the blind.

A window behind a sink puts the bottom bar an arm’s length beyond a wet surface, usually past a tap. Reaching for it with wet hands is unpleasant enough that the blind stops being adjusted — it settles at whatever height it was left at and stays there, which means you paid for something that is now a fixed panel.

Three fixes, decided at the measure rather than afterwards:

A wand at the side. On a venetian the tilt is the daily adjustment, and a wand at the edge of the window is reachable from beside the sink rather than across it.

Size the blind so the bar sits forward of the tap. A mount that brings the blind slightly proud of the reveal puts the bottom bar in front of the obstruction instead of behind it.

A motor on a wall switch. Beside the light switch, not on a remote that lives wherever it was put down. On a window used daily this is the one room where that is easy to justify.

Sun in a kitchen, which arrives low

Kitchen windows are frequently west or south-west, because that is where a back extension usually points, and the sun there arrives late and low.

Low sun is a different problem from overhead glare. It comes in under any covering that is partly lowered, straight into the eyes of somebody standing at a sink, and it lands on a worktop at exactly the angle that makes a stainless steel surface unusable.

That is the strongest argument for a venetian in this room specifically. Tilting the slats redirects a low beam upward at the ceiling — you keep a bright room and lose the glare — where a roller can only shut it out along with the view.

Where a roller is used on a west kitchen window, the fabric wants to be tighter than you would choose for a living room, because low sun is intense and the window is small enough that a tight screen does not make the room dark.

Directly above a hob, which is a different question

Not every kitchen has a window over the cooking, and the ones that do need saying out loud rather than treating as a slightly worse version of the sink case.

Heat rises, and a blind above a hob sits in the column. A gas burner or a hot pan sends a plume straight up. Fabric in that column discolours quickly and stiffens; PVC softens over years; painted aluminium takes it best of anything we fit.

It is also a fire consideration. Nothing that hangs loose, nothing with a cord or a chain that can drift over a burner, and nothing that dangles below the head of the window. That rules out curtains outright at that position and rules out a vertical.

And it is the one place we suggest covering less. A window above a hob is rarely overlooked — it is usually high, often small, and frequently the only ventilation in the room. Leaving it bare, or fitting something that lives permanently rolled up and comes down only when the low sun is a nuisance, is a legitimate answer and it is the one we give most often.

Where something is genuinely wanted there: an aluminium venetian mounted outside and above the opening, clear of the plume, with a wand rather than a cord.

Open-plan, where the kitchen window is in the living room

A large share of newer GTA housing puts the kitchen and the sitting area in one space, and that changes the kitchen window from a utility decision into part of a room somebody sits in.

Two consequences, and both are about agreement rather than performance.

The kitchen window is seen from the sofa. Whatever goes on it is read alongside whatever is on the living-room glass, from across the room, at the same time. Two different products on one sightline read as two decisions — and the kitchen is usually the one that looks like an afterthought, because it was specified for steam while the other was specified for looks.

But the requirements genuinely differ. The living end wants glare control and evening privacy; the kitchen end wants something wipeable that keeps the view. You cannot honestly put the same product on both.

The way this resolves in practice: match the colour and the mount line, not the product. A faux-wood venetian in the kitchen and a roller in the sitting area, in the same tone, with their heads set at the same height off the floor, read as one decision from the sofa. Different products at different heights in different colours read as three.

The mount line is the part people forget. If the kitchen window is smaller and higher than the living-room glass, mounting both blinds from a common height rather than each to its own opening is what makes the wall look considered.

What the visit involves

The window measured, and then the room looked at, because most of this page is about the room rather than the glass.

Where the hob is relative to the window. Where the tap sits and how far it projects. Whether the sill is a working surface. Whether the window opens, and which way the handle goes. Which direction it faces, and at what hour the sun lands on the worktop.

Samples held at the window rather than at a table, and if the room has a strong low-sun problem we will suggest coming at that hour, because it is the one condition a sample book cannot show you.

You keep a written quote with a line per opening, the material named and the control type stated. No deposit, no card, nothing owed either way.

Last updated 9 August 2026.