Vertical blinds

The one thing they do that nothing else does

Every horizontal covering stacks upward. That is fine on a window and a problem on a door, because the covering has to be fully raised before you can walk through — and on a two-metre-wide slider that means operating the whole blind every time you step outside.

Verticals stack sideways. Draw them to one end and the door is clear, with the stack sitting against the frame taking up a hand’s width. That is the entire argument, and on a patio door it usually wins.

The reputation, addressed honestly

Most people picture a specific thing: narrow, glossy, cream PVC louvres in a 1990s office, one of them bent, another missing. That product existed and it deserved its reputation.

What has changed is the vane. Wider vanes in real fabric, in colours that belong to a house rather than a reception area, read completely differently — closer to a drapery panel than to a blind. The mechanism underneath is the same, because the mechanism was never the problem.

If you would rather not have them, that is a legitimate preference and we are not going to argue you out of it. But it is worth seeing a current fabric vane before deciding, and that costs nothing at the measure.

Where they are genuinely the wrong choice

A window you look through constantly. Even fully tilted, vertical vanes break the view into stripes. On a picture window with something worth looking at, that is a real loss.

A draughty door in summer. They swing and they click. Weighted hems and a linking chain help; if the door is open all day, they will still move.

Anywhere the room is already busy. Vertical lines are strong. In a room with panelling, shutters elsewhere or a lot of pattern, they add a third rhythm and the room gets noisy.

Fabric or PVC

PVC wipes, tolerates a wet basement or a laundry room, and is the cheaper of the two. It is also the one that reads as commercial if you pick a narrow, glossy vane.

Fabric hangs better, softens the room, and comes in openness factors like a roller — so you can have a vane that filters light rather than blocking it. It is the version that changes people’s minds about the product.

How we build them

The track is cut to the opening measured in your home, and we set the stack side deliberately — towards the wall, away from the handle, or split to both ends — because on a door that decision is the difference between using it comfortably and shoving fabric aside every time.

Wand control as standard rather than a chain, since a chain hanging across a doorway is both a nuisance and a hazard. Manufactured under our own name, installed by the crew that measured, and the visit costs nothing.

Which way it should stack, and why we ask

This is the question that decides whether you like the blind, and it is the one almost nobody is asked before installation.

Draw to one side puts the whole stack against one end. It is right when one side of the door is the side you walk through and the other has a wall or a piece of furniture the stack can live in front of. Say which side at the measure, because it is set in the track and changing it afterwards is a rebuild.

Split draw parts the vanes in the middle and stacks half at each end. It looks symmetrical, it halves the depth of each stack, and on a wide slider it means neither side loses much glass. The cost is that opening the door needs both halves moved.

Stack in front of the wall, not the glass. On a door with a fixed panel and a sliding panel, the stack should end up in front of the fixed panel. Get it the other way round and the blind is permanently in the way of the part that moves.

We walk the door with you and open it the way you actually open it. People usually discover they use one side ninety per cent of the time, and that answers the question in about ten seconds.

Vane width, and the strip of light between them

Standard vanes are 89mm or 127mm. The narrower one gives more vanes, a tighter closure and a deeper stack; the wider one gives fewer vanes, a cleaner look on a big opening, and a stack that is noticeably slimmer.

Either way, closed does not mean sealed. Vertical vanes overlap rather than interlock, so a closed vertical blind passes a thin line of light down each overlap and a wider one at each end of the track. On a patio door that is rarely a problem — it is a living space, not a bedroom. On a bedroom sliding door it is, and the honest answer there is a blackout roller or panel track over the door with the verticals dropped from the plan.

There is also a floor gap by design. The vanes hang about 12mm clear of the floor so they do not drag, catch or wear at the hem, and on a door threshold that gap is visible. Asking for them to touch the floor produces a blind that looks right for a month and frayed after a year.

One damaged vane is not a damaged blind

Every other product in the range is a single assembly: damage it and the whole blind is what gets replaced.

A vertical is a track and a set of individual vanes hanging from carriers. A vane creased by a door, chewed by a dog or stained by a plant lifts off its carrier and a new one clips on — by you, in seconds, with no tools and nobody visiting. We supply vanes to match what we made; the track outlives several sets of them.

That is worth real money on a patio door, which is the window most likely to take physical damage in a house, and it is the reason verticals are still specified for rentals and for family rooms long after the aesthetic argument has been lost elsewhere.

On a window rather than a door

Most verticals are sold for sliding doors, which is where their one unique capability matters. On an ordinary window they are a different proposition and it is worth being straight about when they are the right call.

Where they win on a window. A tall, narrow opening — a stairwell light, a window beside a front door — suits vertical vanes because the proportion matches: long vertical lines in a long vertical opening look intentional, where a horizontal product cuts it into slices. A very wide window with no reveal also suits them, because a vertical track can span further than most tube-based products without any sag: the weight hangs from a carrier rather than being carried across a span.

Where they lose. A standard, roughly square domestic window. There a vertical reads as commercial, because for thirty years that is where the product lived. That is a fashion judgement rather than an engineering one and it is changing, but it is real and we would rather say it than pretend otherwise.

The one thing to check on a window installation is what happens at the bottom. On a door the vanes hang free to floor level. On a window they finish above a sill, and a vane hanging free above a sill will swing into the reveal in any draught and tap. Either the vanes finish clear of the opening on an outside mount, or they get a bottom chain, or the drop is set so they sit just inside the sill line.

The bottom chain, in one paragraph

A light chain linking the bottom of every vane keeps the spacing even and stops individual vanes swinging out of line. It is also a loop at child height, which is why we fit chainless with weighted vanes as standard in any room a child uses. The regulation behind that, and what it means on a door specifically, is on the patio door page — a floor-level chain across a doorway is the clearest example of the thing the rules were written about.

The track, and the part that wears out

Worth knowing because it is what separates a vertical that is still smooth in eight years from one that is not, and it is never on a quote.

The vanes hang from carriers — small trolleys that run inside the headrail and are linked to each other so they space themselves as the blind draws. Everything about how the product feels is in those carriers.

What a cheap one does. Plastic carriers running in a thin aluminium track. They work perfectly at first, then the linking spacers stretch, the vanes stop spacing evenly, and one carrier eventually binds. The symptom people describe is “it does not close properly any more” — the vanes have drifted, so the overlaps are uneven and light comes through in one place.

What a good one does. More substantial carriers, a heavier extruded track, and a control mechanism that turns every carrier through the same angle. On a wide door the difference is measurable at installation: cheap gear tilts the far end a few degrees behind the near end, so the vanes at one end of a three-metre door are never quite closed when the others are.

The one part that genuinely fails. The tilt rod, on very wide blinds. It runs the full length of the headrail and it is doing the work of turning thirty carriers at once. Past about three and a half metres we would rather split the run than trust one rod, and that is a manufacturing decision made before the order.

None of this is visible when you look at a sample vane. It is the reason two verticals that appear identical can be twice the price, and it is the right question to ask about anybody’s quote, ours included.

What a wall of vanes does to a room’s sound

Rarely mentioned, and on a big room it is the reason some people prefer this product to a roller without being able to say why.

A large modern room with hard floors, a flat ceiling and a wall of glass is acoustically live — speech and television sound bounce, and the room is tiring in a way people usually blame on the layout. Soft surfaces fix it, and the largest soft surface available at a window is the covering.

A vertical in fabric is unusual here because it presents a folded, articulated surface rather than a flat one. Sound arriving at an angle meets vane edges and gets scattered rather than reflected straight back, and in a room with a large glazed wall the difference between bare glass and closed fabric vanes is genuinely audible.

Two practical notes. PVC vanes do very little of this — the benefit is a fabric one. And the effect only exists when the vanes are closed, so it helps most in exactly the rooms where the blind is closed in the evening, which is when a television is on.

It is not a reason on its own to choose a vertical. It is a reason to choose fabric over PVC in a big room, and that decision is usually made on price alone.

What they cost you in maintenance, and what they do not

The carriers are the moving part. Each vane hangs from one, and the carriers ride in the track linked together so they tilt as a set. They are plastic, they wear, and on a door used every day they are the thing that eventually needs attention — usually one carrier, usually years in.

What does not need attention is the fabric, provided the vanes are not dragging. Fabric vanes take a vacuum brush; PVC takes a damp cloth. Neither needs taking down.

The bottom chain is optional and it is a genuine choice rather than a detail. It keeps the vanes evenly spaced and stops them swinging in a draught. It is also a loop at child height, so in a house with a toddler we leave it off and accept that the vanes move a little when the door is open.

Last updated 9 August 2026.