Why a Roman Shade with Cafe Panels was the Right Choice

The other day I showed you the ‘Anthropologie’ inspired bathroom. In that room we made a roman shade with coordinating café panels.

By cleverly mounting the roman shade way above the actual top of the window trim, it instantly tricks the eye into believing the window is larger! (I am always amazed with that trick!) 

This also allows the ‘stack’ of fabric the roman shade will invariably have, to not block the glass of the window, by stacking up above the window.

This is the tile floor in the bathroom the new roman shade fabric was selected to coordinate with. The fabric was carefully chosen to not ‘play it up’ more, but still to make it all ‘weave’ together to make the overall design of the room look like the floor tile was in that plan.

When choosing window treatments, it’s imperative that the function of the treatment is the priority, then, with that you can move on to form. 

For this room, privacy needs for the day were met, by having a pair of café panels on the lower section. To do the café panels in the same stripe as the roman shade would have made the window seem too dark and taken away from the light airy-ness of the room.

So we made it in a medium weight white twill fabric. The sun is intense in this window, so we lined both cafe panels and roman shade with good quality drapery lining.  

Notice how we coordinated the cafe panels with the roman shade by sewing on a rod pocket in the coordinating stripe?

The size of the roman shade is wide enough to complete go across the entire window width, for complete privacy when it’s lowered, it is long enough to go all the way to the sill.  (the café panels are mounted on a tension rod inside the window trim, so the roman shade clears them when lowered) 

For the working mechanics of the roman shade, I bought a roman shade kit at Joann Fabrics. I priced it out and it was more cost effective to do it that way than find and buy all the items separately.

I was super happy with the kit from Joann’s. Instead of rings on the back to hold the strings that operate the shade, there was fabric tape you sew on horizontally and it had loops you put the string through.   

You can just barely see in this picture too, where those horizontal tapes are, I’ve inserted ¼” wooden dowels in each horizontal tape, they make the shade pleat up like magic when pulled up. 

On the very bottom tape I inserted a ¼” solid metal rod though, and that gives weight to the bottom of the shade to lower smoothly.

The strings get all pulled up and looped through the top 2 x 2 covered board that the shade is mounted on, and that’s the board mounted to the wall with the right angle brackets. (in this picture you can really see how far above the actual window trim I mounted the shade, that’s the white trim just at the bottom left corner of the pic… I think it was something like 9” above the window!)

Again, the finished product…

The function needs are beautifully met, by pairing a roman shade with cafe panels. And by mounting the shade extra high, when the shade is pulled up, it tricks the eye to enlarge the window, you can still enjoy the fabric on top, but it clears the glass of the window allowing the precious sunlight to stream into this charming bathroom.

To see more window treatments I’ve made click here!