2021 was a heck of a year, and most homeowners are looking forward to the future of 2022 for some nice changes with major optimism, hopefully without the challenges of last year. Changing your window treatments is a great way to bring in some new cheer and liveliness. You’ve likely been at home a lot more recently than ever before, and updating your home will help to brighten your outlook. Upgrading your window treatments can make the interior of your home more enjoyable. You can renew your home and vitality from drapes to blinds to shades.
High Tech and Convenient Window Treatments
As a modern homeowner, you most likely already have a security system in place, and you can add motorized window treatments to the system for a smart home. The latest in custom window treatments in Scottsdale is motorization for your window coverings. From blinds and shades to other options, they will all allow you to use a simple remote-control system or an app on your smartphone or another smart device to control them. You can open and close window treatments with just the touch of a button, or if you want convenient window coverings, you can program times for them to open and close at different times of the day. This also adds a level of security if you are away from home on vacation, as it appears as if someone is home when the window treatments are opening and closing at different times of the day and night. In a smart home, you can also program lights and televisions to go on and off to make your home look lived in and deter burglars and thieves. Another convenient advantage to motorized window treatments in Scottsdale is that if you have very tall windows, skylights, or hard-to-reach windows, your smart system solves the problems of being hard to reach to control your light and privacy while remaining energy efficient. You can motorize just about any window treatment that you want, and by contacting a local professional, she can guide you to a tech-savvy and convenient window treatment.
Double Duty with Dual Shade Systems
Layering two or more window treatments is not a new concept, but dual shades are a fairly new idea that works wonders in any room. It’s an integrated system that uses dual-layered shades. It combines a transparent light-filtering shade in the front and an opaque room-darkening roller shade in the rear next to the window. This allows you to use the light filtering shades in the daytime to filter out harmful and hot rays while enjoying your beautiful garden or the mountains through your windows. At night, you can instead use the rear shade for a room-darkening effect for total privacy and to keep a bedroom dark while you are sleeping. The ultimate in this situation is to pair it with motorization. Instead of waking in the morning to an alarm that causes you to wake up by startling you, you can set the shades to open and allow soothing morning sunshine in your bedroom to wake you gently and quietly.
Another popular idea for dual shades for a casual appearance is combining a woven wood shade and a cellular shade. The cellular shade is the first layer next to the window, with a woven wood shade that is lined in front of it. Woven woods with a liner will block your views of your beautiful landscaping outside, but when you pair it with a cellular shade, you can have the advantage of still having some view of the great outdoors and an increase of your privacy without sacrificing your natural lighting.
Newer Cellular Shade Innovations
Cellular shades were actually created to give your home the best energy efficiency by trapping air next to your windows and not allowing it to enter the rooms of your home. This allows you to use less heating and cooling to save you valuable money all year round. We are seeing some advances in cellular shade construction and styles for 2022. Most cellular shades were only available in 1-inch and 1.5-inch pleats, but now a newer style is emerging with 2-inch pleats that are coming to the market in 2022. The wider pleats give your shades a more uniform, smoother, and more updated modern appearance. Another attractive new cellular shade is called a cell-in-a-cell shade. As the name implies, a cell-in-a-cell shade traps air between multiple layers of cells situated inside each other for even greater energy efficiency than simple cellular shades with single cells.
New Innovations in Plantation Shutters
Newer styles of plantation shutters are hitting the market with larger louvers that are 4.5 inches wide. The increase in the slat size gives you a cleaner appearance with fewer lines to look much more streamlined than the traditional size louvers in 2.5 or 3.5 inches. Another innovation in plantation shutters is that the bar on the shutter’s front is being removed, and a hidden tilt rod is in place to adjust the louvers instead. You can tilt the louver with your hands or use a remote control or a smart app for your motorized innovative shutters.
What are the Top Window Treatment Styles for 2022?
Several styles to choose from will beautify your home and address your concerns about energy efficiency, light and heat control, privacy, and functionality. Some of the top window treatment ideas for 2022 include:
- All motorized options
- Energy-efficient cellular shades
- Drapery panels and soft treatments
- Hardwood and faux wood blinds
- Classic and timeless plantation shutters
- Roller shades
Stylish Roller Shades
Roller shades are always in style and make a great alternative to blinds. They are easy to operate and work best when they are mounted inside the window frame. Roller shades are generally paired with another soft window treatment, such as drapery panels, for aesthetic purposes and to control light better. Roller shades work well in windows with thick molding in beautiful designs, as they don’t cover your areas of architectural interest in your home but instead highlight them.
Delicate Austrian Shades
Austrian shades are gaining in popularity for bedrooms. The identifying feature of an Austrian shade is the puffy festoons on the bottom in a series that gather when you raise them. They add a sense of delicate and traditional glam to any room where you place them.
Popular Colors for Custom Window Treatments in 2022
Interior design experts and trend analysts report that the emerging color trends for the year will be soft neutrals, monochromatic color pallets, and bright nature-inspired elements. There is also a noticeable increase in gray and gray tones in plantation shutters and wood window treatments in cooler and gray-tinted natural brown hues.
Neutral Walls Let Window Treatments Shine
Another popular idea in 2022 is to use a more neutral wall paint color while using brighter elements in a room, including window treatments to make them the star that shines. This is also a great move because you can change your window treatments to freshen your home, and no matter what you choose, they will likely look fantastic with your otherwise neutral tones. Soft neutrals such as natural linen, off-white, and light champagne tones will look great on your walls with window treatments in the complementary colors of saturated gold, greens inspired by nature, and lovely coral tones.
Living Room Design Trends for 2022
A popular living room design is going down the monochromatic route to include wall paint, window treatments, and shades all in the same color family. This by no means suggests that the entire room is in one exact color, as some homeowners may think about and dismiss it quickly. Instead, you can use different hues or tones, such as a light tan wall with a dark tan cellular shade and lovely off-white linen drapery panels. You don’t just have to stick to the neutrals either–you can make a bold design statement in this monochromatic manner with greens, grays, or any color you wish.
In addition to being monochromatic, living rooms are slated to have floor-to-ceiling drapery panels. These add a huge statement to a room with tall ceilings or large windows by making it seem even grander with a definite WOW factor. In addition, drapery rods are being used to make a statement as well, with beautifully designed finials on the ends to draw the eye to the height.
Retro Floral Style
The retro floral style is also called Granny Chic. It evokes nostalgia, tradition, and comfort as your granny’s home did when you were a child. It’s items like floral wallpaper, vintage couches, and crocheted throw blankets. The best way to incorporate it in window treatments is by using soft treatments, such as draperies, valances, Roman shades, or roller shades. Draperies give you the most options available since they are made from fabric in many types, thicknesses, colors, and patterns that can be made into any style you wish. A popular style of drapery panels for 2022 will be the grommet top or the ring top panels in a layered style with a shade or blind in each window. Roman shades are also made of fabric and can be flat or a soft fold style. You can also have Roman shades in a top-down, bottom-up style so you can lift the bottom, raise the top, or both to control your lighting precisely in any room.
Tips for Choosing Window Treatments
There are several tips designers will gladly share with you when choosing new window treatments. If you want custom window treatments, your designer will make certain that you choose something that is not just a trend and will need replacing in a year or so–unless that is what you want.
Be Careful with the Color
Fabrics with bold patterns and trending colors can be a lot of fun if you plan to replace them when the trends change, so they don’t look dated. Draperies are the best idea, so you can easily change them out as you wish without buying all new window treatments. You can easily opt to use a statement fabric in a layered effect on a window and if you lose your love for it, just change that one layer out. This is much better than having the color of the year on your plantation shutters which are costly to replace after the newness has faded.
Goodbye to the Busy Body
You can create great visual interest when you combine several colors, patterns, and textures in a room, although too much variety in one room looks very busy and can make your space feel very cluttered instead of comfortable and inviting. In one window, you should limit yourself to one or two textures, an understated fabric pattern, and a simple valance for your best look.
Cutting the Cord
Believe it or not, after all the controversy of cords on blinds, you can still find some blinds that have cords. Cordless blinds make it much safer for children, grandchildren, and pets by eliminating a choking hazard, but they look great, are easy to operate, and have no ugly dangling cords. Another great advantage of cordless options is that they always open evenly because you grasp the bottom rail’s center and raise or lower them to the height you wish. We all remember the corded versions that would raise higher on one end than the other, so you would let them down and try again—-this was called the frustration of the day. In addition, you can also add motorization to your blinds to make them more functional and convenient.
No matter what type of change you want in 2022, when you choose to have custom window treatments in Scottsdale, you have chosen the most versatile treatments possible. The sky is the limit!!
