How I Saved £5,782 On Bamboo Blinds

One of my eternal problems is that I have very specific and often expensive taste, without necessarily the budget to match. Once I have a vision in my head I find it genuinely difficult to settle for something lesser - let’s call it dedication.

Sometimes I have an innate feeling that there is another way, I just haven’t worked out what it is - yet. This time it revealed itself with a delve into my 200,000 picture deep camera roll to find something I knew I’d saved at some point.

This marks the start of a new series: How To Save £1000s - where I’ll be sharing how some savvy sourcing saved me thousands and thousands across our renovation (we can add it all up at the end and apply some girl math) - and exactly where to find the same things yourself.

I’m starting with the question frequenting my DMs right now, which is where I found our bamboo blinds. I’ve previously expressed my dislike of naked windows, simple enough to solve on standard sash windows, rather more complex when it comes to seven metres of skylight, south facing no less.

To provide some context - the extension we adopted when we bought the house was small and dark with no rooflight whatsoever, and what little daylight might have made it through was blocked by a pergola and overgrown shrubs. Getting light into the new one was the thing I cared about more than anything else in the entire renovation, so in went a flat skylight made up of four panels, 1.8m in length each. Finally, we had the light extension we’d been dreaming of.

Then we moved in in May, went straight into what’s on track to be the hottest summer on record with heatwave after heatwave and the dining area that gets the direct sun became somewhere we couldn’t actually sit for most hours of the day. After all that determination, I was starting to regret our choices. Had we created a room we couldn’t use half the year? Why did our architect let us do that? Were we going to have to sell the house? I started spiralling.

If you read my post on the interiors decisions I’d consciously made, you might remember I said I’d one day love bamboo blinds for our skylight. I hadn’t anticipated that day arriving quite so urgently.

Custom bamboo blinds for skylights, roof lights and side returns are typically very expensive, so I’d more or less accepted this was something we’d save up for and get to in a few years’ time. I approached a high end blind company anyway, the sort that fits out hotels and very beautiful private homes, mostly to understand what I was dealing with.

They were genuinely helpful - they sent samples, they talked me through how it would all work, and they corrected something I had completely wrong: I’d pictured the blinds running front to back, when in fact they needed to run left to right, which made far more sense once explained. I’d have got it wrong without that conversation, so I’m very grateful for their help.

I’d progressed the conversation as they’d said somewhere around £4,000-5,000 was realistic (still a lot, I know), but the quote landed in my inbox at £6,429, or £7,683 if I wanted them motorised. At about 50% more than we’d initially discussed, I was pushed to look elsewhere.

Next, I looked at Color & Co where I’d got a beautiful bamboo roller blind for our bathroom previously, but they sadly didn’t offer the retractable roof blind system that I needed. I reverted to my trusty screenshots folder. At first I found a reference where someone had ordered raw bamboo panels, had them cut to size, sent to a curtain maker to be edged and then sourced the track system separately. Despite conversing with Claude about the dummies version of how to do this, the £6,429 solution was starting to look more appealing. I am nothing if not allergic to complex instructions.

Then it appeared, from a screenshot I’d saved less than a week after Cosmo was born. A 10am breastfeeding scroll, evidently. I looked it up, half expecting another dead end. It looked promising. I worked out roughly what we’d need and did the maths twice because I couldn’t quite believe it. Less than £400 for all four - a saving of about £6,000.

I quickly decided that if I had £6,429 kicking around I’d sooner spend it on the garden or air conditioning. I figured these were worth trying for a literal fraction of the price. If I did want something more expensive and swanky down the line, they’d be a good test of whether the idea worked at all.

I ordered samples of the few options they had, and when they arrived I laid them next to the more luxe ones on the kitchen table, fully expecting there to be a noticeable difference, but there wasn’t.

I placed the order and a few weeks later the blinds arrived and I had them installed. What we ended up with exceeded all my expectations. Not only are they beautiful, but they’ve softened the space, allowed us to use the room in bright sunshine, added warmth and stopped the heat getting in on hot days. Turns out I didn’t need to save up for years at all.

Read on for the company, all the technical detail, how we actually live with them and an honest account of what you do and don’t get for a saving like this.