Bathroom window coverings

Most advice on this is written for a bathroom that is wet for twenty minutes a day and dry the rest of the time. A Queensland bathroom is not that. From about November the room does not fully dry between showers, and the material choice that survives a Melbourne ensuite is not automatically the one that survives here.

The problem is not steam

Steam is the visible part and the smallest part. What actually degrades a window furnishing in a bathroom is sustained ambient humidity — air that stays damp for weeks — combined with a cold surface for it to condense on.

That distinction matters because it changes what fails. Twenty minutes of steam damages very little. Four months of damp air gets into anything absorbent, anything with a seam, and anything with a cavity. Timber swells and then does not go back. Fabric holds moisture at the hem where the air moves least. A sealed cell holds it indefinitely.

It also tells you where mould appears first, and it is almost never the blind. It is the reveal, the sill, the frame and the silicone — cold, still, and slow to dry. Condensation forms where warm moist air meets a cool surface, and a window is the coolest surface in the room. The blind gets blamed for a problem happening on the glass behind it.

What actually lasts

• Polymer shutters. Our answer for a wet room, and the reason we make Thermalite rather than timber. Advanced polymer does not swell, split, warp or need refinishing, and the louvres wipe with a damp cloth. They also tilt, so you get light without giving up privacy — which is the actual bathroom problem.
• Roller blinds in a wipeable fabric. One flat surface, nothing to trap air, nothing to catch water. The cheapest thing that genuinely works, and easy to replace in eight years if it has had a hard life.
• PVC or aluminium venetians. Non-absorbent and adjustable. More surfaces to wipe than a roller, but they handle a wet room and give directional light.
• Obscure or frosted glazing, with nothing over it. Worth saying out loud: sometimes the right window furnishing for a bathroom is none. If the glass is already obscured and the window is high, you may be solving a problem you do not have.

Two things everyone recommends that we would not

Honeycomb blinds. Look up bathroom window coverings and you will find cellular shades recommended for condensation control. The cells are sealed pockets of still air — that is exactly what makes them insulate, and exactly what makes them the wrong thing in a humid room. You cannot wipe inside a cell, you cannot dry one out, and you cannot see what is happening in there until you can. Honeycombs are excellent in a bedroom that runs cold. In a wet room we would specify something else and say why.

Timber, in any form. Real timber blinds and timber shutters both swell with moisture and then do not return to shape, and the finish goes long before the substrate does. Overseas guides get around this with "faux wood", which is the right instinct. We take it further — we do not sell timber or plantation shutters at all, and the polymer we do sell was chosen for rooms like this one.

Neither of those is a criticism of the products in general. It is a criticism of putting them in a bathroom in a subtropical climate, which is a narrower and more defensible claim.

Privacy without turning the room into a cave

Bathroom windows are usually small, usually high, and usually facing a fence two metres away. The privacy need is real but it is almost always confined to the lower half of the glass, which means covering the whole window is over-solving it.

1. Tilting louvres. A shutter angled upward throws light at the ceiling while blocking any sightline from outside. This is the reason shutters suit bathrooms beyond the material argument.
2. Top-down operation. A blind that lowers from the head leaves the upper glass clear for daylight while the lower half stays covered. Ideal where the window is broad and the neighbour is close.
3. Obscure glazing plus something simple. If the glass is already frosted, all you need is a roller for night privacy, or nothing at all.

What we would avoid is a blockout roller pulled fully down and left there, which is what happens in most bathrooms with a plain blind. The room becomes one you switch a light on to use at two in the afternoon, and a dark bathroom that never gets sun is a mouldier bathroom than a bright one.

One more decision worth getting right, because it is the one people change their mind about later: how far down the window the covering needs to reach. A shutter can be built as a single full-height panel, or split across the middle with the two halves tilting independently — a café style, where the bottom half stays closed for privacy and the top half opens for light. On a bathroom window that faces a neighbour, the split version is almost always the better answer, and it costs very little more than the plain one.

The same logic applies to a blind. If the window is broad, a blind that only ever covers the lower two-thirds does the privacy job without turning the room dark, and it leaves the top of the glass free to bring light deep into a room that usually has only one window. Bathrooms are the room where people most often over-cover the glass, then spend eight years switching a light on at midday.

The part that matters more than the blind

Whatever you fit, the thing that keeps a bathroom dry is moving air. A window that opens, a fan that vents outside rather than into the roof space, and the habit of leaving the door open afterwards will do more for the room than any material choice on this page.

Which is worth remembering when you specify. A furnishing that makes the window awkward to open — a fixed panel, a blind that fouls the sash, a curtain that has to be moved — is quietly working against you. On a bathroom we will ask which way the window opens before we quote, for exactly that reason. A shutter panel hinged the wrong way is a small annoyance in a bedroom and a daily one here.

And when it comes to cleaning: warm water and a soft cloth, on everything. Never a solvent or a household bathroom spray on a fabric blind — the same chemistry that lifts soap scum will strip the coating off a roller fabric, and that is not covered by anything.

Frequently asked questions