Vertical Blinds

Width does the heavy lifting, because it sets the vane count and the track length. Height only adds material to vanes you were paying for anyway — the opposite of a roller shade, where height is what hurts.

The biggest single lever. Flat vinyl at the bottom, textured and S-curve vinyl above it, fabric above that, a vertical sheer well above all of them. The gap between the cheapest and dearest vane on one track is wider than the gap between a small opening and a large one.

A straight one-way track is the simplest thing we make. A split draw adds hardware. A track that turns a corner into a bay is fabricated to your room, and it changes where the stack goes.

Extension brackets to clear a door handle, a ceiling mount instead of a wall mount, a valance over the headrail. Small numbers individually, and the difference between a finished door and a track screwed to a wall.

Motorization adds a motor and power per track, and on a very wide run it is what keeps the blind getting used.

The mechanism is not, and never was. What dates is the vane — the picture in your head is a flat white PVC vane from a 1990s rental, chain along the hem, yellowed at the top. Fabric vanes, S-curve vinyl and vertical sheers each fix a different part of that. If you still dislike it after seeing current samples, a panel track is what we would show you next.

Something that draws sideways: vertical blinds, vertical sheers, a panel track, or drapery. Anything that lifts has to be raised in full every time you use the door. Verticals are the most economical of the four and the only one that also tilts. Our sliding and patio door page compares them on one opening.

Enough to matter. The figure depends on the vane count and the material, so we work it out per opening rather than quote a formula. For scale: each vane bunches to roughly half an inch, so a wide slider with thirty vanes has well over a foot of stack. Where there is wall beside the opening we run the track past the frame; where there is not, a split draw halves it at each end.

Yes. That is a split draw, sometimes called a centre open, decided when the blind is ordered rather than changed later. The vanes divide and stack half to each side, so the opening parts like a pair of curtains. It halves the stack at each end, which is usually the better reason to choose it.

They work on windows, and they are very good on a wide one that a horizontal blind would have to be split across. They look wrong on a small window, because your eye reads the proportion of a three and a half inch vane to a thirty inch opening. Deep sills are the other case: the vanes hang past the sill, so you lose the shelf.

Panel track blinds, vertical sheers, a wide roller shade, or drapery on a traverse rod. A panel track slides three or four wide flat panels behind one another — calmer on a wide opening, but it cannot tilt. A wide roller shade is the only one that will make a room dark, and drapery draws sideways with no tilt at all.

No. Each vane hangs from its own carrier, so a cracked vane is swapped rather than the blind rebuilt — a real advantage over anything with slats on a ladder tape. It does depend on the vane still being available years later, which is why we suggest keeping a spare on a door that sees pets or heavy traffic.

Yes — tilt, traverse, or both, from a remote, an app or a schedule. On Hunter Douglas that is PowerView. It earns its cost on a very wide run or a window wall, where the alternative is walking the length of the glass twice a day. On a single door you pass constantly, it usually does not.