In praise of the humble roller blind and how to do it right

We’ve probably all had some kind of unsatisfactory roller blinds in our lives, if we think back over the places we’ve inhabited. Student rooms, offices and rented houses tend to be rife with the cheap vinyl ‘moisture-resistant’ variety, and this has given the whole style a bad name. Interior design projects, meanwhile, tend to rely on roman blinds, which gracefully unfold and have easily concealed headings, or even the extravagantly swagged Austrian blind. But there are plenty of advantages to roller blinds if you do them carefully, and we’re here to argue that they deserve a renaissance.

“I find roman blinds quite heavy and dressy sometimes,” says interior designer Virginia White, who likes to use the same window dressings throughout a house for a coherent look, and frequently pairs roller blinds with plain cream linen curtains in her projects, as in her own London flat (above). Hers are from the specialist maker Sunnex, made up in an old olive green Holland cloth supplied by her friend Marianna Kennedy, which has the pleasing effect of connecting the interior to the green trees outside. Pairing the blinds with curtains means that the windows look properly dressed, and there are options for how the room can look: drawing the blinds can filter out harsh sunlight but allow for privacy, while drawing the curtains makes for a cosier feel at night.

Design gallery Modernity used a super chic display of roller blinds on their stand at PAD in 2024, hiding the headers behind wooden joinery.

The simple lines of roller blinds can indeed make them more suitable than their dressier cousins for a modern house. As our Style Director Ruth Sleightholme explans, “in a modern, small apartment, it can be best to avoid curtains on the actual windows. Very simple windows are a key architectural feature, and curtains can suffocate them, masking their clean lines and eating too much into the size of the room. Roller blinds in bold colours can be a smart choice; in my own flat I have used Hillary’s – emerald green in the bedroom and canary yellow in the kitchen.” Ruth also points to the a very stylish use of roller blinds by Swedish design gallery Modernity at their stand at PAD in 2024, in which tonal colours of roller blind were used in conjunction with each other, as if covering a very large window. The particularly stylish aspect of this is that the headers of the blinds (their least attractive feature) are covered by joinery – a neat trick we’d love to steal.

Spot the roller blind: in the bedroom of her London house, Rita Konig has used white roller blinds to give a blackout effect, but they are almost invisible with the delicate sheer curtains in front.

Michael Sinclair