Apartment project

Zebra Blinds for Light Control

South Goa

Two zebra blind installations, photographed in daylight so the mechanism is doing its job in both. Zebra blinds alternate opaque and sheer horizontal bands on a single roller: align the bands and you get filtered light with view-through, offset them and the window closes up.

Property type: Gated Apartment
Location: South Goa
Work done: Blinds, Hardware

Two dark zebra blinds side by side covering a wide glazed opening onto a garden

The details

The Decisions That Mattered

The first is a cream blind fitted inside a timber reveal in an air-conditioned living room with dark textured walls. The second is a darker taupe fabric running across a wide glazed opening onto greenery.

Two windows that move between filtered daylight and full privacy on a single pull, without a separate curtain layer.

Cream zebra blind fitted inside a timber reveal in an air-conditioned living room

01Split across the wide openingThe wide window is covered by two blinds side by side rather than one very wide one. Past roughly a metre and a half a single roller starts to deflect in the middle and the mechanism works harder. Two blinds also mean half the window can be adjusted independently.
02Inside-reveal fitBoth are fitted within the reveal against the frame rather than face-fixed over it. It gives a tidier line, protects the roller from direct sun and rain, and in the timber-framed opening it puts the fixing into sound joinery rather than into plaster.
03Fabric tone matched to the room, not the windowThe cream blind sits against a dark textured wall and reads as a light panel; the taupe one sits in a pale room and reads as a dark one. Darker zebra fabric gives noticeably better view-through against bright daylight, which is why it works on the window facing the garden.
04Sealed room versus ventilated roomThe first room is air-conditioned — there is a wall-mounted split unit directly above the window. In a sealed room a blind that closes fully is genuinely useful for reducing the cooling load, which is not true of a naturally ventilated room where blocking the opening stops the draught.