Custom Blinds & Shades in Burlington, NC

The original town was laid out on a grid parallel to the railroad, which runs southeast to northwest. The National Register nomination for the South Broad–East Fifth Streets district points out that the plan sits about forty-five degrees off the compass. In the old part of town, then, a street name tells you little about which windows take afternoon sun. Before recommending solar shades or a denser fabric for a room, we take a compass reading on that wall rather than guess from the street.

South Broad–East Fifth is a good cross-section of the older housing. Its houses went up from the 1890s through the 1940s, including a run of 1920s bungalows, a few in stone veneer, with Craftsman sash in three-over-one, four-over-one, and six-over-one patterns. Those divided upper panes are a big part of the look. A top-down/bottom-up cellular or Roman shade covers the lower sash for privacy and leaves the muntins on show.

East Davis Street, a few blocks east of downtown, mixes large houses built for business owners and doctors with smaller ones built for mill workers, most dating from the 1880s to 1950. Some of its Queen Anne houses, the Stafford-Moore House among them, have polygonal bays. A bay is really several openings meeting at angles, and each face needs its own measurement plus a decision about whether the headrails meet in the corners or stop short of them. Shutters in a bay are especially unforgiving about getting that right.

West Davis Street–Fountain Place, listed in 1984, is a mostly middle-class neighborhood of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Queen Anne and Colonial Revival houses. North of downtown, the Lakeside Mills district keeps part of an 1890s mill village, a one-story brick mill and sixteen frame houses. In a house that size, one well-fitted treatment per window usually looks better than layering shades under drapery.