When choosing a style of window shutters in Palo Alto, CA for the windows in your home, you may be surprised at how many different styles are available. Each style has benefits that you can use to upgrade the décor of your home and to provide more insulation, increased control over natural lighting, and enhanced privacy.
Café style window shutters are a style of window shutters that cover just the bottom portion of windows. These window shutters get their name from their ubiquitous use in both European and American café-style restaurants.
Café window shutters let an abundant amount of natural light in from the top half of the window, but they also provide privacy for the bottom half of the window.
The shutter panels can be opened or closed, but most people keep the panels closed all the time, with the slats tilted slightly open. Choosing wide panes for café window shutters gives the interior of a room a very spacious and more open feel.
Tier on tier window shutters, which are also known as double hung window shutters, are made up of a set of shutters on the top half on windows and a set of shutters on the lower half of windows.
Each set of window shutters is operated independently from the other. Tier on tier window shutters, therefore, give you a lot of control over how much natural light you allow into a room while providing a maximum amount of privacy.
If you have, for example, one of the rooms in your home that faces a road with a lot of traffic, you can keep the bottom set of window shutters closed all the time to have privacy and you can keep the top set of window shutters open so that natural light can bathe the room.
When choosing panels for tier on tier window shutters, your best option is narrow panels that are hinged together. This lets you open the tier on tier window shutters so that they bi-fold onto each other neatly when they are open, ensuring that the view outside the window is fully visible.
Tier on tier window shutters is a popular choice for 135-degree bay windows because they don’t obstruct the view outside. However, if you intend to keep the top and bottom window shutters closed most of the time, then a better window shutter style choice would be full height window shutters.
Full height window shutters include two individual panels that cover the whole window. Hunter Douglas plantation window shutters are an example of full height window shutters. Each window shutter panel opens as a single piece from top to bottom.
Full height window shutters give you a lot of light control as well as a lot of privacy. Full height window shutters create a classic, clean look that enhances the curb appeal of your home and boosts its value.
If you intend to keep full height window shutters closed much of the time, then you should get full height window shutters with wide panels, which will allow more natural light into a room. Most full height window shutters have a middle rail that separates the top portion of slats from the bottom portion. This lets you open the top half of slats at one angle while you have the bottom half of slats closed or open at a different angle.
If you’d like to learn more about window shutters in Palo Alto, CA, you can speak with our experienced staff at Windows & Beyond, Inc.