Blinds or shades can be a good choice for any room of your home, but especially for smaller rooms or smaller windows that are easily overwhelmed by billowy curtains or thick and heavy drapes. The smaller size of blinds and shades also ensure that they won't easily clash with furniture pieces and other accessories, and it can be easier to pair metal or wood blinds with a room's furniture, rather than trying to find curtain fabric that will match those pieces in a room. When you're ready to start looking for either blinds or roller shades for your home, note a few tips for making the selection process easier on you overall.

To soften a space

Woven shades can be good in a space with lots of cold, hard surfaces, such as timber or stone floors. Woven shades are made from natural grasses, fibres, bamboo, or any combination of these materials, so they're a bit softer than wood or metal blinds, or plain and cold vinyl shades. Woven shades can have a loose weave so that they allow in light, or a very dense weave for maximum light blockage.

Deciding on the stack

Stack refers to how blind slats stack on top of or next to each other when opened. When choosing blinds, you need to consider the stack, and the direction in which they'll open; if the sun moves across a window from right to left, you want vertical blinds that stack to the left, so you can open the blinds as the sun moves. If you want blinds that are nearly invisible when opened, you'll want a top stack and a thick head rail, which is the part of the blinds that covers them when opened. This head rail will then hide that stack of blinds, making them look neater and nearly invisible.

Roller versus roman shades

Roller shades are, as the name implies, a blind that is wrapped around a cylinder. You tug at the shade to operate a spring that then rolls the shade around this cylinder.

Roman shades are made of fabric and will have a backing behind this cloth; to open the shades, you pull a cord, and the cloth will fold on itself, creating a pleated look. Roman shades may be more visually appealing in some rooms, but may also look a bit busy and cluttered, especially larger shades over large windows. Consider the size of the windows and the needed size of shades when deciding between roman or roller shades.