Patio door blinds

A door is not a wide window

Most of the trouble with patio door blinds comes from one wrong assumption: that a 2.4-metre door is just a 2.4-metre window with a handle. Everything else follows from correcting it.

A window has one job — control the light. A door has two, and the second one wins. It has to keep working: opened and closed several times a day, often with hands full, often by somebody not thinking about the blind at all. A covering that makes that harder does not get tolerated, it gets pushed aside permanently, and then you have paid for something that lives in one position.

So the specification runs in an order that surprises people. Not fabric, not colour, not even light control. First: where does the covering go when the door is open, and how many actions does it take to get there?

Every honest answer to that on a sliding door involves moving sideways, because anything that stacks upward has to be fully raised before you can walk through — and on a wide door that is the whole blind, every time.

The four options, and where each one fails

A vertical. Vanes hung from a top track that draw to one side. This is the default for a reason: it clears the opening completely in the width of a hand, it tilts for light independently of drawing for access, and it spans wide openings without any of the sag a tube-based product has. Where it fails: closed vanes overlap rather than seal, so a bedroom door will not go dark, and the vertical lines are strong in a room that already has pattern. Everything about how they are built and which way they stack is on the vertical blinds page.

A panel track. Wide flat panels on a multi-track that slide behind each other, like a shoji screen. It reads as far more contemporary than a vertical, it can carry any fabric including a blackout, and it stacks to about the width of one panel. Where it fails: it needs that panel-width of wall to stack onto, and on a very wide door the stack is deep enough to cover a meaningful strip of glass.

A wide roller. One blind across the whole opening. Cleanest thing to look at, best light control, and the only option that can genuinely black out a door. Where it fails: it has to be raised entirely to use the door. That is fine on a door used twice a week — a formal dining room onto a garden — and hopeless on the door a family uses to get to the barbecue.

Drapery on a track. Softest, warmest, best acoustically, and it draws to one side like a vertical. Where it fails: it needs the most stack space of anything here, and fabric hanging in a doorway that is used constantly gets caught, stood on and grubby along the leading edge.

There is a fifth thing that gets sold for doors and should not be: a standard venetian. It stacks upward, it swings when the door moves, and it is the product most likely to be damaged by a door closing on it.

The stack, in centimetres

This is the number that decides the job, and almost nobody is given it before they choose.

A vertical stacks to roughly 12 to 20 per cent of its own width, depending on vane width and whether it is fabric or PVC. So a 2.4-metre door drawn to one side needs somewhere between 30 and 50 centimetres of clear wall for the stack to live on.

Three outcomes, and which one you get is decided at the measure:

There is enough wall. The blind is made wider than the opening, the stack sits entirely on the wall, and when it is open you see the whole door. This is the good result and it is worth checking for even where it looks unlikely.

There is some wall. The stack sits partly on the wall and partly over the glass. Acceptable, and the amount of glass lost should be a number you agreed rather than a surprise.

There is no wall. The stack sits over the fixed pane. Still fine — the fixed pane is not the one you walk through — but it means the covering never fully disappears, and on a door with a view that is worth knowing before ordering.

The alternative to all three is a split draw, parting in the middle and stacking half at each end. It halves the depth of each stack and looks symmetrical, at the cost of two movements instead of one every time you open the door.

Which panel slides, and why it is the whole job

The single most common fault we are called in to fix, and it takes four seconds to get right at the measure.

A sliding door has a fixed pane and a moving pane. The stack must end up in front of the fixed one. Put it in front of the moving one and the blind is permanently in the way of the part of the door that actually opens — so it gets shoved, it wears at the leading edge, and within a season somebody has hooked the end vanes back over the track.

From inside a closed door it is not always obvious which panel moves, particularly on a symmetrical unit. We open it. If you are describing the job on the phone, the useful sentence is “it slides to the left as I look at it from inside”.

The related detail is the handle. A door handle projects into the room, and a blind set to the full depth of the opening will foul it every time the door is used. The blind either sits forward of the handle or the track is set out on brackets, and that is a measurement rather than a preference.

French doors are a different problem

Two hinged leaves that swing, usually inward. Everything above assumes a sliding door and almost none of it applies.

The covering cannot stack beside the opening, because the opening moves. Anything mounted on the wall above will be fouled by the leaf as it swings, and anything hanging loose will swing with it.

So the blind fixes to the door leaf itself — a slim roller or a pleated blind held at both top and bottom, so it travels with the door and cannot swing about when it moves. Held top and bottom is not optional: a blind fixed only at the head turns into a pendulum the first time somebody closes the door briskly.

This is the case the no-drill perfect-fit systems were designed for. A slim frame clips into the rubber bead around the glazing, the blind lives inside that frame touching the glass, and nothing is screwed into the door at all. On a uPVC or composite door that is the difference between a blind and a warranty claim, and it is also the only sensible answer in a rental.

The trade is that the blind covers only the glazed panel, not the whole door — which on a french door is what you wanted anyway.

Bifolds, and the honest answer

A bifold folds back in a concertina, and the leaves stack against each other at one end. There is no wall above the opening that stays available, because the leaves travel across it.

There is no good in-opening answer. The workable ones are:

A blind above the whole run, mounted well clear of the leaves’ travel, sized to the full opening and raised entirely when the doors are open. A wide roller or panel track.

Perfect-fit blinds on each leaf, travelling with the doors. Neat, and it means six or seven small blinds rather than one, which is more money and more things to adjust.

Nothing on the doors, and blinds on the windows either side. Genuinely the right answer more often than the trade admits — a bifold is usually there because somebody wanted the glass.

The threshold, and the gap at the bottom

Vertical vanes hang about twelve millimetres clear of the floor. That is deliberate: touching the floor means dragging, catching and a frayed hem inside a year. On a door with a raised threshold that gap is visible, and it is the thing people ask about most on handover.

Asking for them to touch the floor produces a blind that looks right for a month. Where the gap genuinely bothers somebody, the answer is a heavier weighted hem, which makes the vanes hang straighter and reduces movement, not a longer vane.

On a roller or panel track the bottom of the blind should finish at or just above the threshold for the same reason.

Wind, and doors that stand open

A door open all summer is a different specification from a door opened twice a day.

Anything loose will move, and moving fabric in a doorway makes noise against the frame. Three things reduce it and none removes it: weight in the hem, a linking chain along the bottom of a vertical, and choosing a product that gets fully clear of the opening rather than hanging across it.

The chain is the one to think about twice. It keeps the vanes evenly spaced and stops them swinging, and it is also a loop at exactly the height a small child stands. In any room a child uses we fit chainless with weighted vanes instead, at no extra charge, which is what the Canadian cord regulations point at anyway.

What we measure at the door

The door open, not shut. Almost everything on this page is invisible with the door closed.

Which panel slides. The handle position and how far it projects. The clear wall each side, measured to the nearest obstruction rather than to the corner — a radiator, a light switch and a bookcase all count. The threshold height. Whether the door is used daily or seasonally, because that decides whether a product needing to be raised is acceptable at all.

Then the opening itself, and the fabric conversation last — which on this page is genuinely the least important part.

You keep a written quote with the stack side, the stack width and the mount stated, because those three are what somebody would otherwise have to guess.

Last updated 11 August 2026.