Roman or roller: dressing a south-facing room.

Nearly every south-facing room we are called to has the same complaint attached to it. The room is beautiful in the morning, unusable by two, and whatever is currently on the window is not the thing that will fix it.

South light in Palm Beach County is not the gentle, even light people mean when they say a room is bright. From late morning it arrives high and hard, it moves across the floor rather than staying put, and it brings heat with it that a thin fabric will not touch. Anything you hang on that window is going to spend most of its life working, which is why the choice between a roman shade and a roller shade matters more here than it does on a north wall.

They are, on paper, the same treatment: one piece of fabric that covers the glass. What separates them is what the fabric does when it is up, and how much of the light it lets past when it is down.

What each one actually does

A roller shade is a flat panel on a tube. It rolls away completely, so when it is up the window is clear and there is nothing above the glass but a slim cassette, or nothing at all if we have recessed it into the ceiling. Because the fabric is under tension across the whole opening, it also blocks light more evenly than anything that hangs in folds — there is no stack at the top letting a bright band through, and no gaps between pleats.

A roman shade gathers into folds as it rises, and those folds sit at the head of the window whether the shade is up or down. That stack is the point: it is soft, it reads as fabric rather than as a mechanism, and it gives a plain modern window some weight. It is also, unavoidably, a few inches of permanent coverage at the top of the glass.

The stack is the deciding factor

On a tall window, a roman shade's stack is invisible — eight inches out of ninety is nothing, and the folds sit above the sightline anyway. On a standard window with a low head, the same eight inches is a tenth of your view and a noticeable amount of your morning light, gone permanently.

So the first thing we do in a south-facing room is measure the drop and look at where the head of the window sits relative to the ceiling. Tall windows with a deep head: either treatment works, choose on looks. Short windows, or a head close to the ceiling with nowhere for a stack to go: the roller wins, and it usually is not close.

Heat, not just glare

Glare is the complaint people describe. Heat is the one they have stopped noticing because they have turned the air conditioning up instead. On a south or west wall, the fabric you choose changes the temperature of the room, and the difference between a lined roman and an unlined one is real.

• Unlined natural fabrics — linens and flax weaves — look wonderful and do very little about heat. On a south wall they glow, which is lovely, and the room still cooks.
• Lined romans add a layer of insulation and stop the sun bleaching the face fabric, which it will otherwise do within a couple of seasons on this coast.
• Solar roller fabrics are rated by openness factor. A 3% screen cuts most of the heat and glare and still leaves the view; a 1% is darker and closer to a solid.
• Room-darkening and blackout rollers stop everything, including the view. Right for a bedroom, usually wrong for a living room.

The answer is often both

The most common specification we write for a hard south-facing room is not one treatment at all. It is a solar roller doing the work during the day, with drapery either side to soften the window and close over it at night. The roller is nearly invisible when it is up; the drapery never has to be drawn at two in the afternoon just to make the room bearable.

It costs more than one treatment and less than replacing the sofa that faded. On a wall that gets this much sun, it is the specification that people stay happy with.

How to decide, in order

Start with the drop and the head height, because that decides whether a stack is affordable. Then decide how much view you want left at midday, because that decides the fabric long before it decides the treatment. Then, and only then, choose on looks — by which point there are usually only two or three fabrics left in the running anyway.

If you would rather not do that on your own, that is more or less what the consultation is. A designer comes out, looks at the light in the actual room at the actual time of day it becomes a problem, and brings the fabrics that suit it. Book a free in-home consultation, or see the full range of shades.