Enhance Your Living Room With Top-Down Bottom-Up Blinds and Shades

In many homes, the living room is where some of the best parts of life happen; families gather to unwind and connect. Depending on your lifestyle, you may even eat meals and host parties in your living room. So it’s important to get every aspect of living room design right, from comfortable furniture and your entertainment center to lighting and window treatments. For the latter, there are many different options, with an assortment of blinds, shades, and drapes that can dress your living room windows. But top-down bottom-up shades - sometimes accidentally called bottom-up blinds - are an ideal choice for living rooms, offering unique advantages for the most popular room in your home.

Top-down bottom-up shades get their name from their ability to open from two directions, not just from bottom to top, like standard shades. They can also open from the top downward, revealing only the top half of the window. This allows for more flexibility with how you let light into a room, and, for living rooms, this level of flexibility is invaluable. Here are some of the ways top-down bottom-up shades can enhance your living room experience.

Watch TV any time of day.

When you’re trying to watch TV or a movie during the day, nothing is more frustrating than the sun’s glare impairing your view. Whether it’s kids watching Saturday morning cartoons or you and friends watching the big game, the sun is your biggest daytime viewing obstacle. If your living room has large windows that face the TV set, it can be virtually impossible to enjoy watching until the sun goes down. That is unless you have the right window treatment.

Top-down bottom-up blinds and shades are the perfect solution to daytime screen visibility. They allow for more control of the light that comes in, by letting you open them in either direction to block out the sun’s rays depending on the time of day. These shades can also be made with blackout fabric that blocks out all light when closed, for the moments you truly want no light interfering with your TV.

Block out neighbors—but not the light.

When your family or friends are gathered in the living room, you want to create and private, intimate atmosphere. With top-down bottom-up shades, you can achieve an optimal level of privacy at any time of day. During the day, you can let in light without sacrificing privacy by opening your shades top-down. Light can come through the top section of your windows, while the shades will still cover everything at eye level. That way you can bond with your loved ones in peace, without feeling the presence of uninvited passers-by.

Simplify your life with motorization and automation.

Top-down bottom-up shades can come with motorization, which means you can open and close them with a remote instead of manually. This is a big advantage in living rooms, where you probably want to adjust your shades frequently. Motorization helps keep window treatments that are used often in great shape, by avoiding the wear and tear that goes with constant yanking on the fabric.

Plus, with motorization, you can also automate your top-down bottom-up shades. With automation, your shades are smarter, and you can set them to automatically adjust themselves in a variety of ways. You can set automated blinds or shades to open and close depending on the time of day, even when you’re not around. This helps protect your rugs and furniture from fading. You can also set up automated shades so that they immediately close when you turn the TV on, so you don’t have to manually close them every time you sit down to watch your favorite show.

These are just some of the reasons top-down bottom-up shades make a great fit for living room windows. If you’re still unsure what window treatment is best for you, or want to know more about top-down bottom-up shades, schedule a free consultation with one of our experts..