Roman shades

What you are actually buying

A roman shade is a piece of cloth with battens sewn across it at intervals, on cords that gather it upward into folds. Mechanically it is the least clever product in the range. Visually it is the one that changes a room the most, because it puts a soft, three-dimensional object where every other blind puts a flat plane.

That is the whole case for it, and it is a good one. It is also why the fabric decision here is different in kind from the others. On a roller you choose an openness factor, which is a technical number. On a roman you choose a cloth the way you choose a sofa.

Flat or hobbled

Flat fold hangs smooth when lowered and gathers into clean horizontal folds when raised. It is the quieter of the two and suits a plain fabric, a modern room, and anywhere you want the shade to read as architecture.

Hobbled keeps a permanent soft loop between each batten, so the folds are visible even when the shade is fully down. It uses noticeably more fabric, reads as more traditional, and looks better in a room with mouldings than in one without.

Neither is better. The wrong one in a room is very obvious and the right one disappears.

The stack, and why it decides the answer

When a roman is raised, the folds pile up above the glass. That stack is not small — allow roughly a fifth of the drop, more with a hobbled fold — and it never goes away.

On a tall window in a room you sit in, that band across the top costs nothing. On a short, wide window that you look through while standing at a sink, it costs most of the view. This is the single most common reason we talk somebody out of a roman, and it takes ten seconds to spot when we are standing in the room.

Where it beats everything else

A dining room. A principal bedroom. A window seen from a chair rather than walked past. Anywhere the room already has curtains, cushions and rugs, and a flat vinyl plane at the window would be the one hard, cold surface in it.

They also layer well. A roman over a blackout roller gives you a window that is soft by day and genuinely dark at night, on two independent brackets in the same opening — which is usually a better answer than asking one product to do both.

How we build them

Cut from a single piece of cloth to the measurement taken in your home, so the pattern runs true across the width and there is no join where the eye lands. Battens spaced to the drop rather than to a standard, because evenly spaced folds on a short window and on a tall one are not the same spacing.

Manufactured under our own name, cordless by default in any room a child uses, and installed by the same crew that measured. The visit is free, and if the room you are asking about is a kitchen, we will tell you to put something else in it.

Lining, and the decision people skip

A roman is two decisions, not one: the cloth you see and the lining behind it. Most quotes name only the first.

Unlined lets the weave glow when the sun is behind it, which on a linen in a dining room is the whole reason to buy the thing. It also lets light through at night in both directions, gives no thermal help, and lets the sun reach the face fabric directly — which is what actually fades a shade.

Standard lining is a plain cotton or poly backing. It steadies the hang, protects the face cloth, and takes the glow off without killing it.

Blackout lining blocks the light through the cloth entirely. It does not block the light around it: the folds still sit inside a window with clearance at the sides, so a lined roman in a bedroom is a dark room with two soft edges, not a dark room. If the brief is genuinely blackout, the roman goes over a blackout roller rather than trying to be one.

Interlining is a soft layer between face and lining. It is the expensive option and it is bought for hang, not for light: the folds become fuller and heavier, and the shade stops looking like cloth on a stick.

The one that matters most for how long the shade lasts is the middle one. A south or west window with no lining will show fading along the bottom fold first, because that fold is the one that is out in the sun in every position.

What it does to a window that is not square

Older Toronto houses are not square, and a roman is the product that hides that best.

A roller or a venetian is a straight horizontal line moving down a wall, so a sill that falls half an inch across its width shows as a widening wedge of light. A roman ends in a soft fold rather than a rigid bar, and that fold sits into a gap far more forgivingly. It is not magic — a badly out-of-true opening is still badly out of true — but on the half-inch of movement that is ordinary in a century semi, a roman is the one you do not notice.

Where it is less forgiving is depth. The folds need somewhere to stack, so a shallow reveal pushes the whole shade forward or outside the opening. We measure the reveal before anything else on this product.

Living with one

Cleaning. Vacuum on low with a brush head, along the folds. Fabric shades are not washable in place and most face cloths are not washable at all — a wet clean shrinks the cloth against the battens and the folds stop lining up. Spot marks come out with as little water as will do it, blotted, never rubbed.

Cats. A roman is a ladder. If you have a cat that climbs, the cords and the cloth are both at risk, and cordless does not help with the cloth. This is worth saying out loud before rather than after.

Steam. A kitchen or a bathroom will age fabric faster than a living room will, and no lining changes that. In those rooms we would rather sell you a faux wood venetian and keep the roman for somewhere it will last.

Re-hanging. Because the shade is one piece of cloth on a batten frame, it comes off its brackets and goes back on in a minute. If you move house and the new window is close in size, it is often worth taking them with you and having them altered rather than starting again.

What a roman does to a room that no other blind does

Worth stating directly, because it is the reason to accept every compromise on this page rather than buy something more practical.

Every other product here is a flat plane. A roller is one surface; a venetian is a stack of straight lines; a vertical is a set of straight lines turned ninety degrees. They are all, visually, architecture — they read as part of the building.

A roman is the only thing in the range that reads as furnishing. It has depth, because the folds catch light differently on the top and the underside of each one. It has weight, because cloth hangs. And it has a hand — a linen behaves differently from a cotton, which behaves differently from a wool blend, in a way no vinyl or aluminium ever does.

The practical consequence is that a roman is chosen against the room’s soft things rather than against the window. A sofa, a rug, curtains elsewhere, the tone of the timber. Held up against the glass alone it will look wrong as often as right, because the glass is not what it has to agree with.

It also means the room decides the fold. In a room with mouldings, panelling and pattern, a hobbled fold with its permanent soft loops belongs; a flat fold in the same room reads as underdressed. In a plain modern room the reverse is true, and a hobbled shade looks like it was borrowed from somewhere else.

The one room where all of this is beside the point is a room you are trying to make dark, or wipe clean, or look through constantly. There the roman is the wrong answer whatever it does for the atmosphere, and the rest of this page is about knowing which room you are in.

Over a radiator, and over a deep sill

Two situations that come up constantly on the older housing this product suits, and both change the drop rather than the fabric.

A radiator under the window. Very common in pre-war houses, and a roman is the worst product in the range to hang in front of one. Fabric in dry rising heat stiffens and discolours, and it does it fastest at the bottom fold, which is the one sitting directly in the current. Worse, a heavy cloth hanging in front of a convector traps the warm air against the coldest surface in the house — the glass — where the room gets no benefit from it at all.

The answer is to stop the shade at the sill above the radiator rather than run it past. That means accepting a shade that does not reach the floor in a room where the proportions might have wanted it to, and it is the right trade. Where the radiator sits proud of the wall, an outside mount that stands clear of it is the alternative.

A deep sill nose. A generous sill is a lovely thing and it interferes with an inside-mounted roman in a way it does not with a roller. The bottom of the shade needs somewhere to sit, and if the sill projects into the reveal the lowest fold lands on it and stops folding cleanly — you get one squashed fold at the bottom that never looks right.

Either the shade finishes above the sill, which on a short window loses more of the glass than people expect, or it mounts outside and comes down in front of the nose. On a window with trim worth seeing, that is a genuine trade and it gets made at the measure with a tape rather than at a desk.

The headrail, which is a real choice

The top of a roman is not one thing, and what holds it up changes both the look and how it behaves.

A batten. The traditional answer: a timber batten, the cloth stapled or hooked to it, the whole thing screwed to the reveal or the wall. It is simple, it is what makes a shade easy to take down and re-hang, and it leaves the mechanism visible from below if you are looking up at it.

A cassette or headbox. An enclosed head that hides the lift mechanism and the top of the cloth. It looks finished from every angle, it closes the light path over the top of the shade — worth having behind a blackout lining — and it needs more depth than a batten does.

A track. Used where the shade is very wide or very heavy, where the extra structure keeps the lift running evenly across the span. It is the answer for a shade over about two and a half metres, and it is the reason a wide roman is not simply a narrow one with more cloth.

The point of raising it is that a quote for “a roman shade” can mean any of the three, and they are not the same money or the same product. Asking which one is in the price is one of the three questions in the next section.

If you are comparing quotes

Ask what the lining is, ask how deep the stack will be at that drop, and ask whether the cloth is cut from one piece across the width. Those three answers explain most of the spread between two prices for what looks like the same shade, and none of them appear on a quote that gives one number per window.

Last updated 9 August 2026.