Custom Window Treatments in Encino

Window treatments built for Encino homes

Heat and UV are the brief on most Encino jobs, and privacy usually isn't. Lots here run deep and the planting is mature, so the neighbors are rarely the problem. The sun is. West and south glass takes triple-digit afternoons for weeks at a stretch, and in the houses built around a pool there's a second source nobody expects: glare coming off the water and back up into the great room, which is why a room can still feel blinding after you've shaded the sky. Solar roller shades in a 3 percent weave handle both, cutting UV and killing the reflection while keeping the yard in view. Lined and interlined drapery does the insulating work on the big sliders, and it earns its keep twice, holding heat out in August and holding warmth in on the cold clear nights that follow a Valley winter day. Fabric choice matters more here than almost anywhere we work, because sun this direct will fade anything that wasn't picked with it in mind. Sun that hard does more than heat a room, too. We see hardwood faded in a stripe where the slider light lands, art that's quietly been moved twice, and rugs a shade lighter along one edge. A solar fabric rated for UV is the cheapest insurance in the house, and it does the work whether or not anyone is home to close anything.

The estate stock south of the Boulevard brings its own list. Entry windows that run two full stories, stairwell glass on a landing no ladder reaches comfortably, and clerestories above the slider line that were drawn for daylight and never given a way to stop it. That glass wants motors. On new construction we plan the wiring with your electrician before the drywall closes, which costs nothing at that stage and becomes a real project later; on finished houses, battery motors do the same job with no wall damage. A lot of the work up here is whole-house rather than room by room, coordinated with a designer or a general contractor across a long remodel, so we're used to holding a fabric schedule for months and installing after the painters are out. Down on the flats the ranch houses ask for less and deserve the same care: recessed rollers that disappear into the ceiling line, relaxed romans in the bedrooms, and drapery hung high and wide so a long low window reads taller than it measures. The ranch stock also has one advantage the estates don't: deep eaves. A three-foot overhang on a south wall does real shading from May through August and almost none in December, when the sun drops low and comes straight in underneath it. That's why we walk the house at the measurement instead of working from a floor plan. Two windows on the same wall can want different fabrics depending on what's hanging over them.

One recent Encino Hills project ran the shape most of them do. A west-facing great room with twenty-two feet of slider onto the pool deck, a two-story entry window over the front door, and four upstairs bedrooms whose owners had stopped sleeping past six in June. Solar rollers went on the slider line, motorized and scheduled to drop at two. Ripple fold drapery on a ceiling track crossed the full span in a heavy linen blend. A single motorized blackout roller covered the entry glass on the same remote, and blackout-lined romans went into the bedrooms. The great room stopped being the room they avoided every afternoon, and the early Valley sunrise stopped being a factor upstairs.