Home / Guides / Reveal vs face fit
Guide · the measure
Reveal fit or face fit: the decision behind the millimetres
Every blind quote hides one early fork: does the blind live inside the window opening, or in front of it? The answer changes how dark the room gets, how the window looks dressed, and what the tape measure needs to capture. Here's the decision as we make it, so your quote reads like sense instead of jargon.
Reveal fit: inside the opening
The blind mounts within the window recess, sitting close to the glass. It's the tidy option, architraves stay on show, sills stay usable, and the window reads as architecture rather than upholstery. The physics: fabric needs a few millimetres of running clearance each side, so a thin line of light rides in at the edges. In a living room nobody notices. In a bedroom at dawn, you will.
Reveal fit wants depth, enough recess for the tube and bracket to sit inside without the fabric proud of the wall. It also wants a reasonably square opening, which is why we measure width and drop at multiple points and take the smallest honest numbers.
Face fit: in front of the opening
The blind mounts to the wall or architrave above the window and hangs proud of it, usually made oversized so fabric overlaps the opening on each side and below. Edge light now lands on the back of the fabric instead of your pillow, which is why face fit is the darkness play for bedrooms, and the rescue for shallow or crowded reveals where winders, handles or flyscreens would foul a reveal-fitted blind.
The look is more deliberate, the blind becomes a visible panel on the wall, so head heights and overlaps have to be chosen with the room's lines in mind, not just the opening's.
What we check at a measure, window by window
- Reveal depth, is there room for the hardware to tuck in fully?
- Squareness, both diagonals; old openings especially. The blind gets made to the opening you have.
- Obstructions, winders, latches, taps, security screens; the things that turn a neat reveal fit into a scraping noise.
- Where the light comes from, an east bedroom pushes the call toward oversized face fit; a south living window frees it.
- Fixing substrate, timber, brick, plasterboard or steel lintel decides the anchors, so brackets hold for the life of the blind.
You don't have to hold any of this; it's our job on the day, and the reasoning lands in the written quote. But a homeowner who knows the fork exists asks better questions of anyone who quotes them, which is exactly why this page is here.
Before we visit, if you want a head start
Nothing is required, the measure is ours to do, but it speeds the visit if you've thought about which rooms need darkness, which windows feel exposed, and whether anything unusual lives around the frames. Run your windows through the window finder and bring its list; it asks exactly those questions.