Privacy by Design

How the right window treatments solve the biggest challenge of city living

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You chose the city for a reason. The walkability, the culture, the restaurants, the transit. But the city came with a catch: your neighbors can see right in.

That is the trade-off, and it shows up most clearly at the window.

If you live in a Capitol Hill row house, your front room sits three feet from the sidewalk. If you are in a Brookland colonial, the foot traffic picks up every spring. If you bought a ground-floor condo in a newer building, you have floor-to-ceiling glass and a clear sightline from the lobby.

So you close everything off. Heavy curtains go up. Blinds stay permanently shut. The room gets darker, the space feels smaller, and the natural light that made you fall in love with the place disappears behind a wall of fabric. It does not have to work that way.

You do not have to choose between privacy and light

Most people assume privacy means dark rooms. More coverage, less light. That is not true, and believing it is why so many city homes feel closed off when they should feel open.

Think about where light comes from and where sightlines come from. Light comes from above. The person on the sidewalk is looking straight ahead, at eye level. A treatment that blocks the view at eye level while letting light in from above gives you both.

A top down bottom up shade does exactly that. You lower the top half and light pours in from the sky. The bottom half stays closed. Your room stays bright. Nobody outside can see in.

Plantation shutters do the same thing differently. Angle the louvres upward and light bounces off the ceiling. The gaps at eye level are too narrow to see through. You get an open, bright room. The street sees closed shutters.

Every room is different. Your windows should be too.

Your bedroom needs full blackout. Your front room needs daytime screening but not total coverage. Your kitchen needs something moisture-resistant and easy to clean. Your home office needs glare control that does not wash out a screen.

Start with how you actually use each room, at what time of day, and what bothers you most. A nursery facing east needs blackout for morning naps. A living room facing the street needs screening that works after dark when the lights are on inside. A dining room you only use in the evening needs a completely different treatment than one you work from during the day.

When you think about it room by room, you end up with a home that feels private, comfortable and full of light at the same time. When you pick one treatment for the whole house, you end up with rooms that feel either exposed or dim.

Your DC home is not a suburban house. Your windows

should not be treated like one.

Your row house sits on the lot line. Your ground-floor condo has oversized windows at sidewalk height. Your historic district limits what you can change on the exterior. The solution has to come from inside.

That is why the right treatment matters more here than it does in a suburban house. Shutters suit the proportions of a tall, narrow row house window in a way that a roller shade never will. Sheer shades preserve the daylight quality that large condo windows were designed to deliver. Cellular shades in a top down configuration work on the Victorian double-hung windows that make up most of Capitol Hill and Brookland.

The fit matters as much as the product. If your home is older, the casings have settled and the openings are not standard sizes. You need a treatment measured to what is actually there, not to a size out of a catalogue. If your condo has rules about exterior appearance, you need something that meets those rules from the outside and looks intentional from the inside.

Privacy is not about hiding

Privacy in your home is not about shutting the world out. It is about choosing what the world gets to see. The right window treatments give you that choice without giving up the light, the view or the character of the home you chose.

That is what good design does. It solves a real problem and makes the space

better, not just more covered.

Ready to see what the right window treatments can do for your

home? Book your free in-home consultation at

mitsnewashingtondc.com or call 202-929-5200.