A living room with framed art on every wall and a sliding door out to a small wood deck. Two light filtering roller shades cover the slider and roll up out of the way.
What is the best shade for a balcony slider in a living room?
For most sliders we like a roller shade. It rolls up into a small tube above the door, so nothing hangs in the way when you step out, and it comes down flat when you want the room softened.
This Rancho Santa Fe living room is a good example. The slider opens onto a small balcony with a wood deck, a folding bistro table and two chairs, and a railing with trees and a neighboring roofline past it. The room itself is busy in a good way. There is a framed grid of prints on one side of the door, a framed sheet of stamps on the other, a desk lamp, a printer cabinet and a sofa with a red pillow.
With that much going on, the window covering had to be calm. A white, light filtering roller shade does that. Closed, it glows. It lets daylight in, blurs the view of the deck and keeps the sun from hitting the art straight on. Open, it nearly vanishes.
Why use two roller shades on one slider instead of one?
Two shades are lighter, easier to lift and more flexible. You can raise the side over the moving door and keep the fixed side down.
A single shade across a whole slider makes for a long, heavy roller tube. Wide tubes can sag a little in the middle over time, and they take more effort to lift. Splitting the width into two shades keeps each one a manageable size. Here the seam between them sits close to the middle of the door, so it lines up with the frame of the glass and is barely noticeable when both are down.
It also suits the way people use a balcony door. Late in the day you might want to slide the door open for air while the sun is still bright. Raise the shade on the moving panel, leave the other one down, and you have a way out and shade at the same time.
We build every roller shade to the measured width of the opening it covers. That is what keeps the gap between two shades this small.
How high should you mount roller shades over a sliding door?
Mount them well above the door frame and wide of the trim on each side. When the shades are fully raised, the roll then sits on the wall instead of over the glass.
Look at the open photo. Both shades are rolled all the way up, and the bottom bars stop above the top of the door. You get the full height of the slider for light and for walking through, and the view of the trees is not cut off by a band of rolled fabric. If we had mounted the shades inside the door frame, that roll would hang down into the opening and block several inches of glass all day long.
An outside mount like this also covers the edges better when the shades are closed. The fabric overlaps the trim, so less light leaks in at the sides. It is a small choice that makes a slider feel bigger. Our post on custom vs off the shelf blinds explains why stock sizes rarely get this right on a door.
Do light filtering roller shades protect framed art from the sun?
They help. A light filtering fabric cuts the direct sun that hits the walls near a slider, which is the light that fades prints and photos fastest.
In this room the art hangs right beside the door on both sides. When afternoon sun comes through bare glass, it lands on those frames at an angle for hours. Lowering the shades turns that direct beam into soft, spread out light. The room stays bright enough to see the art, and the frames stop taking the full blast.
No fabric stops fading completely, so for very valuable pieces we also talk about UV film on the glass or a tighter weave. For a living room like this one, a white roller shade strikes a good balance. It is bright, plain and easy to use every day.
We design window treatments in Rancho Santa Fe for rooms like this all the time, where the walls matter as much as the view. If you have a slider beside art you care about, book a free in-home consultation and we will bring fabric samples you can hold up against your own frames.
