Drapery or shades on a really big window?

On a really large window, a shade handles the sun and drapery handles the room. A roller or solar shade at the glass is what intercepts glare, heat and fading, and it does it across a wide span without needing anywhere to stack. Drapery gives a big opening scale, softens the acoustics of a room with a lot of hard glass, and cuts the perimeter draught in winter — but it needs wall to stack against, and on a very wide span that wall is often not there. On most large windows the answer is both, specified together.

What a big window is actually doing wrong

Large glass fails in four ways at once, and the mistake is treating it as one problem.

• Glare, because the light source is enormous and low in the afternoon.
• Heat, in both directions: solar gain in August, and a cold surface radiating in February.
• Acoustics. A wall of glass is a hard reflective plane, which is why big rooms with big windows sound like they do.
• Scale. A twelve-foot opening with nothing on it reads as a hole rather than as a window, and everything in the room looks small next to it.

A shade answers the first two. Drapery answers the last two. That is the whole argument.

Where a shade wins

Roller and solar shades scale to width better than almost anything else, because the fabric rolls up into itself rather than stacking sideways. On a patio wall or a run of glass across the back of a house, that is decisive: there is nowhere for a drapery panel to go when it is open, and a shade needs nowhere.

Shades are also what actually intercept the sun. Fabric at the glass, chosen for openness and colour against the orientation, is what stops the glare and the fade. Solar and roller shades · Why a west wall is the hard case.

The practical limit is width: past a certain span a single shade becomes a very large, very heavy roll, and the honest answer is two or three matched shades on one header rather than one enormous one. We would rather tell you that at the measure than have you discover it at the install.

Where drapery wins

Drapery does the things a shade cannot. It gives a tall opening vertical weight, so the room reads as designed rather than as glazed. It absorbs sound, which in a room with a stone floor and a glass wall is not a small thing. It closes the draught at the perimeter through a Northeast Ohio February. And on a very tall window it is the only treatment that looks right at that scale — a shade is a horizontal band, and drapery is a vertical line.

It needs somewhere to stack. A panel that opens has to go somewhere, and if the glass runs wall to wall, that somewhere is in front of the glass. Ripplefold on a track stacks tightest, which is why it is usually the answer on a big opening. Header styles and how they stack.

Doing both

A solar or light-filtering roller at the glass, drapery on a track outside it. The shade does the sun; the drapery does the room, and it draws when you want the wall closed at night. Because we cut the shades and sew the drapery in the same building, they are specified against each other — the stack depth, the bracket projection and the return are worked out once rather than discovered when the second one arrives.

On a very large opening this is also what makes motorization worth it: a wall of glass is exactly the case where operating things by hand means nobody operates them. Motorized shades and drapery tracks.

Getting the proportions right

Two decisions decide whether a large window looks considered or looks covered.

How high the drapery goes. On a tall opening the rod or track usually wants to sit well above the window head — often close to the ceiling — rather than tight to the frame. It makes the room read taller and it means the stacked panel covers wall rather than glass.

How wide the stack is. A panel that opens has to land somewhere, and if that somewhere is the glass, you have paid for a view and then hidden a third of it. Ripplefold on a track stacks tightest; the width it needs is a number worth knowing before the hardware is ordered, not after.

Two-storey and angled glass

Great-room gables, stairwell windows and clerestories are their own case. Reach rules out anything manual, angled heads rule out some hardware entirely, and the mounting condition at the top of a two-storey wall is usually the thing that decides the answer. It is a look-at-it problem rather than a choose-from-a-page problem.

Have a designer look at the span