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.
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.
Even if you don't want to make a decorative feature out of them, roller blinds can be an immensely practical choice alongside or even other blinds, as they can add much-needed privacy and block out the light for a proper blackout effect. In this case, the trick is to make them as unobtrusive as possible. In the bedroom of her London house, Rita Konig has used white roller blinds paired with sheer, floaty curtains. The blinds are useful in a bedroom that looks onto the street, but they essentially disappear when they are rolled up, as the curtains draw the attention. In her farmhouse in County Durham, Rita has also paired them with bamboo chik blinds, explaining that "the bamboo becomes sheer when the lights are on and I don’t like seeing the darkness through them. To prevent this, in rooms where they are the main blinds, I have added off-white Scottish Holland roller blinds by The SH Blind Company behind them. When you pull the roller blind down, the bamboo becomes opaque, creating a warmer look.”
There are things to bear in mind with roller blinds: unlike roman blinds, which can be made up in pretty much any fabric and have a lining added to them, roller blinds have to be made up in a relatively stiff fabric that will roll up easily and hang well. Holland cloth or bookcloth is a great choice – pure cotton and with a beautiful texture, these will allow light through and look sophisticated enough to hold their own in a well-designed room. For the best bookcloth blinds in some truly lovely colours, head to Marianna Kennedy, who supplied those in Virginia White's house.
But as Ruth says, even the standard roller blinds from Hillary's or other high street retailers can be a stylish solution in the right environment. Streamlined, lightweight and easy to fit (and being polyester, usually resistant to humidity), their manifold virtues mean we're hoping to see them more often in the projects on our pages.
