Tier on Tier, Café Style or Full Height Shutters?

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Café style plantation shutters refers to shutters that do not give full coverage of the window. They will normally be shutters that cover just the lower half of the window. This can be to whatever point on the window you choose, but most often customer will have the top of their shutters line up with a natural divide on the window. This design is intended to give privacy on the lower section of the window and normally entails the panels being closed over the majority of the time, but having the slats tilted at an angle for privacy. This still allows light to come in fully through the upper portion of the window and also through the tilted slats.

Here are 3 photos which show café style shutters. The wood stained shutters are installed on a window with a natural break located approx 2/3 up from the sill. The other photo shows a Victorian Bay Window which is very typical of the type of window having café style shutters. With many such homes located close to the road, people walking past are prevented from looking into the room when the slats are tilted. The final photo shows that you can have café style shutters and curtains and still create a good look. The curtains have the benefit of being able to be closed over, making the room feel cosier on cold winter nights.

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This design of shutters gives full window coverage with shutter panels covering the entire area of the window. However tier on tier means that the panels on the upper portion of the window can be opened independently from the lower portion of panels.

This design is most typically used when you want to leave the bottom panels closed over most of the time for privacy (similar to the way café style shutters are used) but open back the top set of panels to allow maximum light to enter the window.

This is one of the most typical designs our customers choose on Victorian bay windows. Often such windows are very close to the pavement and people walking past are prone to turn and have a little nose in the window! Leaving the lower section of panels closed over, with slats tilted at a slight 45° angle provides privacy but opening back the panels on the top in the daytime provides maximum light.

When considering if this is the right design of shutters for you, consider if you actually will open back to the top panels. We normally recommend having narrower panels when ordering this design so that the shutter panels can bi-fold onto each other. This way, they’re not eating up too much space in the room. However, if you end up not opening the panels very often, the downside is that you have more solid wood due to the framing of the shutter panels which can make the window a little ‘busy’.

 

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Full height shutters are, like tier on tier shutters, designed to give complete coverage of the window. However this design does not have the panels split horizontally as with tier on tier.

Full height shutters can have either a full run of slats from bottom to top or be designed to incorporate a mid rail which results in 2 separate slat areas above and below the mid rail point. A mid rail is a popular choice with customers who have taller windows as the mid rail not only gives a visual break in the ‘run’ of slats but also works very well from a functionality point of view. Similar to tier on tier you can tilt the slats at a 45° angle on the lower half and tilt the top section of shutter slats fully open to give an unobstructed view.

Try to think about how often you’d want to physically open back the shutter panels. Most people who have full height shutters find they rarely open the panels back, so putting a mid rail in place makes sense for giving added flexibility. However, if your window is short (eg under 600mm high) we’d suggest avoiding a mid rail as if could make the design a little too fussy.