The Windows Are Bare, And That Is Normal
The first properly dark evening catches everyone out. You put the light on, look up, and the window has stopped being a window. It is a black mirror with the street somewhere behind it, and you are looking at yourself looking at yourself.
So, do new builds come with blinds. Almost never. A handful of plots do, and we will come to those, but the standard answer across nearly every housebuilder in the country is no, and it is deliberate rather than an oversight.
Why they are left out
Window dressing is the most personal decision in the house and the one with the shortest life if it is chosen badly. A blind fitted before you moved in would be a blind chosen by somebody who had never met you, in a colour picked to suit four house types at once. Builders leave it out for the same reason they leave out the sofa.
There are exceptions worth checking. Some incentive packages include blinds, particularly on slower-selling plots and part-exchange deals. Apartment schemes sometimes use door units with integral blinds sealed inside the glass. If something was included it will be in your reservation paperwork. If it was mentioned by somebody on a Saturday in a sales cabin, check the paperwork.
What you are more likely to have is a manufacturer's sticker in the corner of each pane and, in a ground floor bathroom, a sheet of privacy film. No poles, no tracks, no battens, nothing fixed above any window anywhere in the house.
What the window decides before you do
This is the part nobody writes down, and it is the reason two identical-looking windows take completely different solutions.
The trickle vent. That slotted strip along the top of the frame is not decorative. New builds are sealed far tighter than older houses, and the vent is a large part of how the place handles the moisture it is still carrying from construction. Do not fix anything across it, and watch the headrail of a blind fitted inside the recess, which can sit directly under the vent and choke it. If your first winter brings water running down the inside of the glass, this is usually why.
The handle. Tilt-and-turn windows, common in apartments, swing inwards into the room. Anything fixed inside the reveal fouls them. The same applies to French doors and most back doors with glass, where the handle projects far enough to stop a recessed blind before it stops anything else.
The reveal. New build reveals are often too shallow to take the brackets and headrail of a recessed blind, and almost never perfectly square. Measure the depth before you assume the blind goes inside.
The wall above. Plasterboard over blockwork, with a lintel sitting directly above the opening. A pole carrying lined curtains is heavier than people expect, and plasterboard alone will not hold it. It needs the right fixing into something solid, and the lintel is rarely where you would guess from looking.
The radiator. If it sits under the window, that decides whether curtains stop at the sill or run to the floor, and it wants deciding before you order fabric rather than after.
Which windows want a blind and which want curtains
Bathrooms, en suites and the downstairs cloakroom take a blind. Fabric near that much moisture is a slow mistake, and a blind you can wipe is the right answer.
Kitchens take a blind too, kept clear of the hob.
Bedrooms are where people go wrong. The instinct is a blackout roller, and a blackout roller in a recess leaks light around all four edges, which in June means the room goes light at half past four whatever the packaging said. It is worse on a new estate, because the site compound lighting and the new street lighting are both brighter than what you are used to and neither of them goes off. Blackout lined curtains on a pole set above and wide of the frame will beat it, and a blind behind them handles the rest.
The rooms you sit in want curtains. Blinds alone are functional and leave the window reading as an opening rather than a feature, which is the difference the echo article is also about, since soft fabric at the window is doing acoustic work at the same time. The rules for hanging them are in where to start in a new build: higher and wider than the frame, full enough to look generous when drawn, touching the floor.
The landing window is usually fine left bare. Tall, awkward, overlooked by nothing, and the light is worth more than the privacy.
Measuring is where the money goes wrong
Decide recess or face fix first, because they are different measurements and getting them the wrong way round is not recoverable on a made to measure order.
Measure the width in three places, top, middle and bottom, and take the smallest. New build plaster bows more than it looks. Use a steel tape, not a cloth one. Two centimetres out makes a blind unusable rather than slightly wrong, and made to measure is not returnable.
It costs nothing to have it measured properly instead. Interior designers in Bristol, ourselves included, will normally measure as part of quoting, and so will any decent curtain fitter working around Bath, Keynsham or Portishead.
What to do this fortnight, and what can wait
Buy temporary paper concertina blinds for the bedrooms and the bathroom. They are cheap, they stick straight to the frame, and they buy you the weeks you need.
Then leave the rooms you sit in alone until you have seen the light in them morning and evening. Window dressing is the second decision in the house, not the first, and it is worth making it with information.
One thing not to leave. Made to measure runs on lead times, and ordering in October arrives for Christmas in a way that ordering in December does not.
Bare windows are normal. They are also the thing that will change your rooms most, which is an unusual combination and the reason this is worth doing properly rather than quickly.
Send us the window shot
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Stand in the doorway, take one photo straight at the window with the room light on, and send it to us. Tell us three things with it: which room it is, whether the reveal is deep or flat to the wall, and whether there is a trickle vent along the top of the frame.
We will tell you which of your windows will take a blind, which ones want curtains instead, and whether the pole can go where it needs to go on that wall.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.