The recent weather has been pretty exceptional even by the very best standards of British springs. There have been many sunny Aprils in recent years, but, according to the Met Office, this year saw the very sunniest on record. This was followed by the hottest May Day ever.

For some, this has been great news, especially in a place like Brighton, where some will have needed little prompting to head to the beach, while others will have enjoyed the early-season cricket at Hove or gone for a walk on the Downs.

However, for those not able to spend their days outside in the sun, the extra sunlight can be a problem at times. Dazzling glare can be distracting, making it harder to see laptops for those who are working instead of out enjoying themselves, or who simply want to do the housework without being blinded.

The need to keep out the sun is why shutters were first used in southern Europe, where the Mediterranean climate made sunny days the norm. It may be that climate change will make southern England more like that in years to come – if it isn’t already.

A great option for your windows is full height shutter blinds. This is because they offer the most comprehensive means of keeping the glare of the bright sun out of the room, which will be particularly useful when the window faces south.

In winter, when the sun is low in the sky, these may not be needed higher up the window, but you can be sure they will be in the summer months – and the longest, lightest days of the year, when the sun rises to nearly 63 degrees in the sky, will occur next month.

Shutter blinds of this type are especially useful when you have tall windows, which is the case for many of the Regency buildings in Brighton, although other buildings have large windows too.

You may need such shutters less in smaller windows, or when the windows do not face the midday sun. But when the full glare is beaming into the room and making it hard to see what you are doing, the capacity to fully block it out is invaluable.

Brighton is a place that’s famous for some very distinctive and unusual buildings, from the grand style of its Regency properties to the remarkable Pavilion. But most of its residential buildings still have windows that would seem to fit most styles of blinds and shutters.

However, there are instances when homes have unusual features and windows can come in various shapes and configurations. That doesn’t mean you can’t have blinds fitted, though; it is where our skill in offering bespoke solutions for any window will come to the fore.

Brighton certainly has some curious homes. This month, a townhouse sold with an unusual feature at its entrance – an old red phone box. If the new owner gets in touch and wants us to fit blinds in that, it really will be a bespoke job.

This home is not alone in being unusual. One only has to look at any set of listings of homes for sale to see the enormous variety of housing types. There are grand Regency Villas, large detached homes, semis, terraces, modern blocks of flats and bungalows, with their settings ranging from the densely populated inner city to the rural fringes by the South Downs.

In such circumstances, your windows may be large or small, your need for privacy will vary depending on whether your living room is on the ground floor or faces another upper-floor flat across the street, while some homes will have bay windows and others flat panes.

Because this is the reality not just of living in Brighton but providing shutters and blinds to its population, we have a wealth of experience in designing and crafting shutters that will suit every home, window and circumstance.

This means whatever your home is like, whether it is on the fifth floor or even if it has a red phone box incorporated into it, we can devise a great solution for you, providing a stylish and practical set of blinds that is made to measure for your home.

Because your windows represent such a significant part of any room at home, it’s essential that you take the time to decide upon the best way to dress them up. Without proper planning and forethought, you might end up making an expensive mistake!

Curtains and drapes have their place, of course, but you might find what you’re looking for in half height shutter blinds, a brilliantly versatile option that can be used to great effect throughout the house.

But where to put these shutters? Which rooms would they work well in?

When deciding on the best shutters for your home, it’s important to think about how you use the space. If you want to maintain a level of privacy but still allow lots of lovely natural light to flood the room, cafe-style shutters would be a great option to consider.

They look especially lovely in the kitchen, where you need natural light to help you cook but where you also want to keep the prying eyes of passersby at bay. In fact, any ground floor rooms that face the street would benefit from these types of shutters, including downstairs water closets, living rooms and dining rooms.

Shutters such as these give you the best of both worlds, with privacy provided at the lower half of the window, leaving the top half free and clear to bring in natural light. The added benefit is that because they’re half the height of regular shutters you can enjoy the look and feel of these window treatments while keeping costs down.

The resulting look with cafe shutters is very distinctive and unique, so if you’re keen for something a little different, they could well be the window dressing for you. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch with the Brighton Shutters team today.

There are many great attractions to Brighton and Hove, not least its many fine buildings. Its Regency-style architecture is dominant and the majority of these are residential buildings, with the best examples including the Brunswick and Kemp Town developments.

Of course, these are a long way from representing all the homes in the city; lots of people live in red brick semis or terraces, for instance. But the fact remains that many people dwell in these elegant buildings amid tall windows and white stucco plaster.

Not surprisingly, a large proportion of these buildings are listed. Indeed, it is no surprise that the Regency Ward is well ahead of the rest for listings, with 354, while Queens Park (which includes Kemp Town) is second with 238.

A key question that may be asked by anyone moving into one of these buildings, or wanting to change the décor, is whether they can fit window shutters. After all, listing does place restrictions on how much one can change the appearance of a building.

The answer, we can happily say, is yes. That’s good news for us because if it wasn’t the case, being based in Brighton we would have to turn a lot of disappointed people away. But it’s also great news for you if you have a fine Regency window (or live in a listed building that isn’t built in that style) and want to fit shutters.

Quite simply, being in a listed building is no impediment to having shutters at all. As West Country Shutters put it: “Installing shutters has no greater implication than hanging a picture on a wall or putting up a curtain pole”.

They make this point having had a lot of queries from folk living in listed buildings in their target area, which includes the cities of Bath and Bristol, which are both full of historic listed buildings.

So, for anyone listed building, whether a Regency building here in Brighton or a Georgian mansion over in Bath, fear not; there is no restriction whatsoever on having shutters in the windows.

The beauty of plantation shutters is that they make as much or as little a statement as the homeowner wants them to.

In a light, airy room, a set of white or off-white shutters will add to the light feel without ever getting in the way, whilst simply painting them a darker or brighter shade will create in itself a statement piece.

It is perhaps telling that one of the most famous houses in the history of cinema appears to have been carved out of white marble except for the notable black pairs of exterior louvred shutters that cannot help but catch the eye.

Twelve Oaks might be the true star of the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, even above Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable, and many of the film’s most famous scenes are framed in a segmented light only possible with perfectly placed louvred shutters.

The house itself was more in line with the Colonial Revival architectural movement, with its vast array of columns, double-hung shutters and symmetrical facades which exaggerate features from the historic buildings depicted in the original Margaret Mitchell novel.

This caused some mild controversy, although as history has remembered the film adaptation far more vividly than the book, the iconic appearance of Twelve Oaks is defined by black louvred shutters and white columns than the original 1836 house.

The author of the original book was somewhat unhappy with this change, expecting a more historically accurate house to be used. Ultimately, the striking and deeply staged and cinematic feel of the cinematic Twelve Oaks and its beautiful shutters ultimately ended up winning out in the public consciousness.

It may have also had an effect on reviving plantation shutters as a popular design feature in the United States and making louvres a hugely popular summer house feature in other parts of the world that drew similar inspiration. 

Right now, householders will not spend any time worrying about too much sunlight coming into the house. With the shortest days of the year down in Sussex lasting fewer than eight hours and lots of gloomy weather, any natural light at all is welcome.

However, you don’t need to have been among the revellers at Stonehenge on the solstice to know the days are now starting to get lighter. This won’t make much difference at first, but the inevitable turning of the seasons means that six months from now, there will be plenty of light pouring in.

That may not always be good news, however, as bright summer light can be dazzling, while the illumination it provides can also make it easier to see inside your property, not something you will welcome if prying eyes can see in easily – a major concern for those whose windows face straight out onto the street without a suburban garden hedge or fence in the way.

Here is where solid panel shutters can be so useful. Because they have solid slats instead of lighter louvers, a key benefit of them is they can be used to keep almost all the light out, which is great when it is too dazzling. This can also be extremely handy to maintain privacy, a most useful thing for the windows of a room you may get undressed in.

Solid panel shutters also offer strong insulation. This is something that can be useful both at this time of year and in the summer. In the latter case, it keeps the inside cool when closed by stopping the heat from the sun from getting in, while in winter it helps to keep the heat inside the building.

They are also useful at keeping out excess noise – again a useful feature in an urban setting – and have great traditional charm, making them ideal for the Regency architecture of Brighton and Hove especially. Solid shutters are more than just a solid choice.

If you are choosing a new set of shutters, you may wonder if the benefits of the kind you choose will be greater at some times of the year than others. However, there is no risk of that happening with half-height shutter blinds.

Sometimes known as café-style shutters, these shutters are designed specifically to offer the greatest flexibility. Of course, all shutters do this to an extent, because the louvers are all controlled by strings that you can pull or loosen to shut or open them, enabling you to control the amount of light coming in, as well as whether those outside can see in or not.

The second of these considerations covers the issue of privacy; there will be plenty of times you need them closed, especially if your home faces straight out onto a street, as opposed to a situation where you may have more cover from prying eyes, such as having a garden with a hedge between you and the pavement.

However, at this time of year, you may think more about the effect of the light. This particular kind of shutter, when facing due south, will allow unfettered illumination to pour in through the window when the sun is high in the sky, as it is in summer. The sun is too high to dazzle, but floods the room with lots of lovely light and warmth.

However, when the sun is low, the shutters can either be opened to let the sun in or closed to keep it out. Here in Sussex, the December sun can drop to below 16 degrees above the horizon even at midday.

The benefit of shutters is that they allow the flexibility to deal with two weather scenarios; if it is cloudy, which is normal, you won’t get dazzled by the sun, but you can benefit from keeping the blinds open so you maximise the little light that there is. By contrast, when the sun is visible at this time of year it can be dazzling, making closing the blinds necessary.

Such flexibility means that, whether it is all about getting the amount of natural light you want or maintaining privacy, half-height shutters offer the best of both worlds.

There is a certain archetype when it comes to louvred shutters, and that is that they have to be a relatively neutral colour, which typically is characterised as either pure white, silk white or off-white.

The reason for this is to create the greatest amount of light reflection possible in a room, which in turn helps to make it look bigger. Whilst this can be important if you are looking to sell your home in the near future, not everyone goes to a shutter company looking for pure kerb appeal.

If you are not looking specifically to maximise room size, and you are not wedded to the idea of creating a summer getaway in the dead of winter, you might wonder whether all louvred shutters necessarily need to be white, and the answer is a resounding no.

One of the advantages of neutral shutters is that they go with every interior design style from Scandinavian minimalism to maximalist cottagecore. This means that choosing shutters that are not a neutral shade requires a greater focus on the overall aesthetics of the room.

Typically, this means choosing a shutter colour that matches the accent colour of furniture, fittings or an accent wall itself. This helps turn the shutters into a feature of the room’s design in itself and is a perfect way to personalise.

Black, navy and other dark-coloured shutters are also effective for very similar reasons; they provide a strong counterpoint to lighter-coloured rooms and can add a luxurious finish to nearly any room they are added to by virtue of being such a unique choice.

In any case, shutter experts can see your room design and give you advice for which types of colours will work and which might conflict with the ultimate design goals for the room, but do not feel like there is any limit to which shutter colours can work.

Of all the different kinds of blinds, shutter blinds do the most to keep light out. That may make them less useful in some rooms of the house, such as the living room or kitchen, because of their all-or-nothing utility. However, there are places where they are entirely useful.

The bathroom can be one of these, because it helps maintain privacy. But the most common place to find them is the bedroom.

An obvious reason for this is to be found in summer, when the late sunsets can make it hard for children to sleep and early sunrises can wake everyone up too soon. While the longest daylight hours in Britain are to be found in Scotland, even down here in Brighton the sunrise and sunset can be over 16 ½ hours apart in Midsummer.

All of this provides a good reason to think about investing in such blinds as summer approaches, especially if the window faces toward the rising sun in June. But shutter blinds can also be very useful even in the darker months that we are now into.

The most likely reason for this is artificial light. The coastal towns of Sussex may not be like Blackpool with its seafront illuminations, but there are plenty of cases where lights will commonly be close to windows.

It may be that the window is near a street light, or it could be close to a security light that is frequently illuminated, not because burglars are lurking but because it is being tripped by a roaming cat.

With Christmas approaching, there may also be lots of festive lights outside homes that can add to the light pollution.

When shutter blinds were first invented in Classical Greece, such nocturnal light pollution would not have been a major consideration. But in a modern setting, it is not just summer that creates the need to shut extra light out to help people get an undisturbed night’s sleep.

A lot of people are opting for louvred wooden shutters, because of the curb appeal, the beautiful way they frame windows, the better control of light on sunny days or the fact they last a lot longer than blinds whilst requiring far less maintenance.

Another big reason why shutters are popular during the winter is a matter of security. Whilst plantation shutters do not resemble traditional security shutters, there are options available to make louvred shutters a key component of your security system.

Shutters by themselves can help improve security simply by stopping people from looking into your home and seeing that there are valuables that could potentially be stolen, but aside from that, various options for security plantation shutters do exist.

One option for external shutters is simply adding a latch to fit a padlock, but whilst easy to install, it is not necessarily the best option from a security standpoint, can only be used on the ground floor, and whilst it will stop some rather more casual burglary attempts is unlikely to stop a committed criminal by itself.

A better option is an integrated security shutter, which features a lock built into the shutter that stops the shutter from being forced open by locking down panels at the top and bottom.

In terms of appearance, they look like other wooden louvred shutters, but at their core tend to be a stronger material such as aluminium, which also helps to avoid attempts to force the shutters open or break them to get access.

This is often beneficial when security is paramount but more conspicuous options such as grates, bars and metal roller shutters are less desirable because of the aesthetic implications of fitting such conspicuous security measures.

Louvred security shutters are a significant investment due to the specialist work involved but could be worth exploring as a beautiful alternative.