Our Honeycomb Shades Are Here. Sheltering at Home Week 47.
Our living room-dining room remodel has been done for months, and now, finally the job is complete: our new window treatments are in place.
And you can barely see them.
For decades, our living room windows were framed by — and partially covered by — lush, creamy draperies.
The draperies were pretty. But the view they obscured was even prettier.
A Minimalist Window Treatment This Time
So this time around, we went minimalist with our window treatment. Instead of draperies (which are quite costly these days — so much of the fabric comes from China), we chose honeycomb shades, also known as cellular shades.
When the new shades are retracted, you can hardly tell they are there.
And that’s the way we like it. It’s our woodsy view we want to see when we sit down to dinner. We want to see our cypress tree. And through its branches, the fog rolling in across the San Francisco Bay.
Honeycomb Shades — They Get Small
The honeycomb material is so thin that eight feet of vertical shade collapses into a discrete, seven-inch space at one end of each slider.
And so, unless the afternoon sun happens to be blasting at us through the dining room window, that’s where our new window treatments stay — out of sight.
More about our remodel at “Hey, HGTV Fans. Take a Look at Our Remodel.” As for installing draperies, read about that at “Window Treatment Stick Shock.”
Your project came out so beautiful! What color are your honeycomb shades? I also have very large windows and sliding doors. My husband and I put in honeycomb shades years ago, but ours were all horizontal and difficult to use. We went with shutters.. not plantation, narrower. I’m very tired of dusting them. Thought about drapes, but seeing your shades, I’m rethinking. I like the idea of verticals. Also love your deck. Thanks for sharing ☺️
Our honeycomb/cellular shades are off white. The ones on the two 8-foot sliding glass doors are vertical. They retract to one side. Amazingly, even though they cover an 8-foot wide window, they retract into a panel that is about 7 inches wide. Out of sight! Supposedly the cellulars are also good insulators, which will be nice on the few really hot days we get. Our windows are also dual pane glass and great insulators as well.
On our other windows, which are about five feet wide and do not open, we have horizontal shades. Again they retract to a very small space, which is really good for our purposes as we want to see the view, not the shades. Also, we like the dark bronze color of our Blomberg aluminum windows — they make for a very nice frame of our view, so we don’t want them to be covered up. The dark bronze color matches the color of the limbs of our cypress tree — a cool effect, imo.
We have narrow shutters in an upstairs bedroom. The were there when we moved in 40+ years ago, and I still like them. The advantage is that we can open the top pair of shutters and keep the bottom pair closed. That way we have privacy, but we can still see sky and trees out the top. I do not dust my shutters! They don’t look dusty!
I still like draperies, but they are very expensive these days. We decided against them so as not to cover up our view. The shades are very minimalist and can feel severe. They seem to work just fine in our case.
Perfect!
Good to know that you like it. We had a hard time letting go of the draperies habit.
Beautiful!!
Thanks, Jan. Sitting at that dining table over breakfast and lunch is such a pleasure now.