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A happily sleeping baby is a wonderful thing. A crying baby—not so much. When you’re trying to get your baby to fall sleep—and later trying to keep them asleep—you need as much help as you can get—and that means the right setting. And one way to achieve an ideal setting for sleep is picking the right window treatments.
Why are window treatments so important? Darkness, quiet, and coziness are all things that window treatments can provide. With the right blinds, shades, shutters, or drapery in your baby’s room, you’ll find that it’s easy to provide the right conditions for sustained sleep.
What makes the perfect window treatment for your baby’s nursery? The first requirement for anything that goes into the baby’s room is safety—and that means choosing blinds, shades, and drapery with no cords, because cords can be a potential entanglement hazard. Fortunately, nearly every type of blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery can be purchased cordless or motorized—which means no visible cords. Cordless and motorized shades are also extremely convenient.
Window treatments today come in a dazzling variety of designs and styles offering the full range of light control options, with everything from sheer fabrics to room darkening fabrics to blackout fabrics that provide the ultimate in light control. You’ll also find blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery that can be easily adjusted to increase or decrease light or privacy. This ability to adjust the window treatments means you have greater control over the light and temperature of the nursery. And the abundance of options means you’ll have no trouble coordinating your nursery window treatments with the blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery throughout your home. There is no reason your nursery’s window treatments shouldn’t meet all your needs and look great, too.
Designing the Perfect Haven for Your Little One
There’s a long list of tasks and decisions a new parent faces when setting up the home environment for their new baby. With the help of a Graber Design Expert, window treatments could be the easiest decision you’ll have to make. Window treatments can go a long way towards creating the nursery environment you’re looking to create—the amount of visual space your window treatments take up in a room gives them a lot of power in the overall room design. Your Graber Design Expert can help you find safe, attractive, highly functional blinds, shades, shutters, or drapery for your nursery—quickly and easily. In addition to expertise, you’ll also get creative ideas for a truly tailored solution.
What is the Best Window Treatment for a Nursery?
The best window treatment for your nursery will be safe, easy to use, and provide enough light control for your baby to sleep. There are many window treatment designs that offer these qualities, including roller shades, drapery, window blinds, natural shades, shutters, and cellular shades. We’ll go through these options in more detail later. The important thing to remember is that you’ll have no trouble finding window treatments that function well in your nursery and also look great.
Prioritizing Safety: "Is It Safe to Have Curtains in a Nursery?"
Curtains are available without cords, making them a solid choice for your nursery. Graber offers cordless and smart shade options for nearly all blinds and shades.
Any corded window treatment can pose an entanglement hazard for children and pets. And care should be taken to securely fasten all fittings, including brackets, cleats, and other hardware. Loose or dangling embellishments should be avoided because they’re potential choking hazards. But if all these precautions are taken, drapery can work beautifully in your nursery.
One disadvantage of drapery is that it can be grabbed and pulled down by children who can reach the hem of the drapery. This is something you should consider. But many nurseries use drapery—its simplicity and good looks make it an excellent choice.
With the huge array of safe options, it isn’t difficult finding the perfect solution for your child’s nursery. Cordless and smart shade (motorized) options are many—you will not feel limited in your choices.
Optimizing for Sleep: Light & Temperature Control
Cool, dark rooms are ideal for sleep. Creating this optimal environment involves a little planning. Getting the right window treatments is a great place to start.
Room darkening and blackout shades and curtains are ideal for creating the darkness necessary for good sleep. Blackout shades produce the darkest rooms, but room darkening shades offer a number of advantages. Because room darkening shades and curtains allow some light to pass through the fabric, they are generally more attractive than blackout shades. During the day, room darkening shades produce an environment where there is still enough light for you to navigate the room and check on the baby. Lastly, room darkening shades allow the baby to acclimate to sleeping in a room where there isn’t absolute darkness—if you have a baby that has become used to an ultra-dark room, traveling with the baby or having to use different rooms for sleeping could prove quite difficult.
That said, blackout shades produce a very dark room. And if you’re seeking this type of sleep environment, blackout versions of drapery, cellular shades, natural shades, roller shades, and Roman shades are available to create that cave-like sleep environment (which is why many night-shifters and day-sleepers choose blackout shades).
Controlling Temperature with Cellular and Roman Shades and Drapery
The window treatments you choose can have an impact on the temperature of the room. By using cellular shades, Roman shades, or thick drapery, you can help block the sun’s heat from entering the room. Cellular shades are the top performers in this area, blocking more than 70% of heat transfer during the summer. All these options also protect against cold in the winter. Cellular shades have the added benefit of dampening sounds—these shades really are an ideal option for your nursery.
Recommended Window Treatments for Nurseries
Roller Shades
The sleek, simple roller shade is an ideal window treatment for your nursery. One pull of the hem bar and you have instant light control. Roller shades are available cordless or as smart shades (motorized), making them very easy to use. And roller shades come in a range of fabrics, from sheer to blackout. You’ll want to choose a room-darkening shade or blackout shade. The advantage of a room-darkening shade over a blackout shade is that for many parents, a room-darkening shade provides enough light for a baby to sleep but also allows enough light for the parent to move around the room when the shades are closed.
Custom Drapery
Drapery is incredibly versatile. Not only is it available in a huge variety of colors, patterns, and textures, you’ll also find room darkening and blackout options that are ideal for a nursery. Opening and closing your drapery is a cinch, and Graber drapery fabrics are durable and attractive. Drapery should never be hung near the crib, and for rooms where toddlers will be playing, consider ordering shorter length curtains that will hang out of reach of young hands.
There are people who consider drapery perfectly fine for nurseries and others who are adamantly against it. If you are at all concerned about hanging drapery in your nursery, there are many other excellent options, including cellular shades.
Drapery has a very special attribute—layering. You can layer drapery over shades or blinds for added light control and privacy. Layering also increases your temperature control by adding extra insulation and protecting against drafts. Layered drapey also looks great—there’s an elegant, finished look that layering creates that many homeowners love.
Blinds
Wood blinds, faux wood blinds, aluminum blinds, and vinyl blinds can all be effective window coverings in a nursery. Wood blinds are a classic choice—the natural wood grain and the feel of real wood are timeless. Faux wood, aluminum, and vinyl blinds are less expensive options but still offer the same precision light control that all blinds provide. While you will not get blackout-level light control from blinds, you should enjoy excellent room darkening. And, importantly, Graber blinds are available in a cordless configuration for a safer solution for your nursery.
Natural Shades
Made with hand-harvested natural materials like wild grasses, bamboo, and wood, Graber natural shades provide excellent light control. By adding liners, you can boost that light control all the way up to blackout level. There’s a special beauty to natural shades, and they might add just the right natural touch to your nursery. Choose from cordless and smart shade versions of the natural shade.
Roman Shades
Graber’s tailored Roman shades can be made with hundreds of different fabrics and are available in cordless or smart shade configurations. That means you can select just the right fabric to create the atmosphere you’re looking for in your nursery. Similar to natural shades, you can add liners that increase the light control abilities of these shades—all the way up to blackout level protection.
Cellular Shades
Cellular shades are available in room darkening and blackout fabrics that are ideal for nurseries. Best of all, cellular shades provide sound dampening—an outstanding trait for a nursery window treatment. You’ll find cordless options as well as smart shades. If there’s an ultimate shade for your nursery, it’s the cellular shade.
Shutters
Graber shutters are incredibly durable, easy to adjust, and provide versatile light control. With shutters, you can achieve a fairly dark room. They are available in a wide range of wood grain and painted colors and can be configured to any window. And because they have no cords of any kind, they’re extremely safe.
Designing Your Nursery Window Treatments: Style Meets Serenity
When planning a nursery, having control of the lighting and the sunlight entering the room is essential. Your window treatments should provide enough darkness for sleep—and that generally means a room-darkening fabric. The level of darkness these types of fabrics provide are adequate for nearly every infant or adult. But for those who would like an even darker room, blackout fabrics are available in roller shades, Roman shades, natural shades (by adding a special liner), cellular shades, and drapery. It isn’t hard to find an option that meets your light control needs.
The more complex task is finding a solution that fits your style and looks great with your nursery’s décor. We’ll talk about that next.
Choosing Colors and Patterns
The color, pattern, and texture of your window treatments can set the tone of the room. Create a calming atmosphere with gentle blues or soft neutrals. Or liven up the nursery with brighter colors or primary colors. Patterns can also bring energy to a room design—select a pattern that resonates with other colors or patterns in the room to develop a sense of design cohesion. Just keep in mind that your colors might need to change as your child grows up—that fuchsia-striped wall might not be your child’s favorite pattern when they’re twelve years old.
Huge Range of Materials and Textures
The range of materials available to you is incredible. Hundreds of fabrics for drapery and Roman shades. Countless roller shade fabrics, dozens of slat options for blinds, incredibly durable materials for shutters, and lots of easy-to-clean options. Use your window treatment selection to help drive your design goals—your ability to select exactly the right color or design makes window treatments a great place to start when designing your room.
Tailored Design for a Perfect Fit
Custom made window treatments fit perfectly and work flawlessly. Graber Design Experts carefully measure windows and make special adjustments to ensure that the window treatments work optimally. The craftspeople who build the blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery know exactly how to craft each product to fit the design expert’s specifications. This attention to detail is especially important for blackout shades in rooms where maximum darkness is desired (although, as we explained above, extreme blackout conditions are rarely needed).
Partnering with Graber: Expert Consultation for Your Nursery
Graber’s experts can help you find the perfect window treatments for your nursery. That’s because they have years of experience selecting the perfect custom products to meet the needs of a diverse range of homes. There’s virtually no window that can’t be covered with a set of blinds, shades, shutters, or drapery from Graber. By working with an expert, you avoid pitfalls. You also enjoy personalized advice that helps you choose a child-safe product that is exactly what’s right for your goals and your home. Maximum safety, optimal light control, easy operation, and stylish fabrics—when you go with Graber, you can have it all. And you don’t need to worry about measuring and installation—your Graber Design Expert does all that for you.
Create the Ideal Nursery with Graber
Finding the perfect window treatments for your infant’s nursery is easy with Graber. With thousands of fabrics, the complete range of window treatment designs, and thoughtful experts ready to help you achieve your goals, Graber really does make finding the right blinds, shades, shutters, or drapery simple and straightforward. You’ll never have to compromise safety for style—and you’ll enjoy window treatments that fit perfectly and work flawlessly.
Ready to design your dream nursery? Explore Graber's premium collection and connect with a Graber Dealer today for personalized guidance.
