For most bedrooms a single blockout roller does the job. It’s the cheapest route to a properly dark room, and if the bedroom is somewhere you mainly sleep, you don’t need anything more complicated.
The double roller approach, meaning two fabrics working the same window, earns its keep when the bedroom does daytime duty as well. A nursery where naps happen at 11am. A room that doubles as a study. A street-facing bedroom where you want daylight without an audience.
Here’s how each one behaves in a bedroom, and how to tell which situation you’re in.
Blockout fabric is opaque. Light doesn’t pass through it, which makes a closed blockout roller the simplest way to get a dark room for sleeping. Our Vibe range comes in ice, cloud, mist and storm.
Darkness matters more than people give it credit for. The Sleep Health Foundation’s sleep hygiene guidance notes that a brightly lit environment in the evening reduces melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy. Streetlights, a neighbour’s sensor light and a 5am summer sunrise all work against you, and fabric is the cheapest thing standing between them and your bed.
The trade-off is that a blockout roller has one setting that works. Down, and the room is dark. Up, and the window is bare. There’s no middle position that gives you daylight and privacy at once, which is fine at 10pm and less fine at 10am if you’re still in there.
A blockout blind blocks light through the fabric. It does not stop light coming around the fabric, and in a bedroom that difference is the whole ballgame.
An inside-mounted roller sits within the window reveal and the fabric is cut narrower than the opening so the tube can turn. That leaves a strip of clear glass down each side. At night it’s nothing. At sunrise, with the sun low and straight at the window, those strips throw two bright bars across the wall and you’re awake.
So if a dark room is the point, mount outside the reveal, over the architrave, with the blind wider and taller than the opening. Roll direction helps too. A back roll drops the fabric closer to the glass and tightens the gap. Our guide to inside and outside mount measuring covers how to measure for each.
Get this wrong and the most expensive blockout fabric on the market won’t give you a dark bedroom. Get it right and a standard one will.
A double roller means two fabrics covering one window: a sunscreen or light filtering layer for the day, and a blockout for the night. You run whichever you need.
The daytime layer is the point of it. Sunscreen mesh lets you keep the blind down through the morning, so the room stays light and you keep some outward view, while people outside can’t see much of anything in. Then the blockout comes across at bedtime.
On our site you’d build this as two separate roller blinds on the same window, one mounted inside the reveal and one outside it. Two blinds, two chains, two prices. If you want them on a single bracket instead, get in touch before you order and we’ll talk you through the options.
Put the sunscreen on the inside, sitting in the reveal against the glass, and the blockout on the outside where it can overlap the architrave. That order matters. The blockout is the one doing the light-sealing work, so it wants to be the layer that’s wider and taller than the opening. Reverse them and you’ve given your best fabric the tightest fit and the biggest gaps.
Day to day it’s less fiddly than it sounds. The sunscreen goes down in the morning and mostly stays there. The blockout gets pulled at bedtime and lifted when you get up. Two chains on the same window does mean two things to reach for, which is worth knowing if the window sits behind a bed or a cot.
Be honest about how the room gets used. A single blockout roller is the right answer if:
Most bedrooms in most houses fall in here. Two blinds on a window that only ever needs one is money you could put toward doing the rest of the house.
Go to two if:
The pattern is straightforward. If the room needs to be usable and private in daylight, one fabric can’t do both jobs and you’re better off with two.
Roller blinds start at $84 with free delivery Australia-wide, and pricing runs off your exact width and height, so a second blind on the same window roughly doubles what that window costs you.
Worth weighing that against the alternative. A single blockout plus a curtain gets you something similar for less, though a curtain will collect more dust and take up wall space. If the room genuinely needs daytime function, two blinds is the tidier answer.
One thing not to do is buy a light filtering fabric as a compromise between the two. It’s neither. It won’t darken the room enough for a good sleep-in and it won’t give you the outward view a sunscreen does. Pick a side per layer and let each fabric do the job it’s good at.
| Your bedroom | What to order |
| Sleep only, faces a fence or side yard | Single blockout roller, inside mount is fine |
| Sleep only, faces a street or east-facing | Single blockout roller, outside mount over the architrave |
| Nursery with daytime naps | Two blinds, sunscreen and blockout |
| Doubles as a home office | Two blinds, sunscreen and blockout |
| Shift worker, needs full darkness | Single blockout roller, outside mount, back roll |
| Large window, hot afternoon sun | Two blinds |
If you’re still weighing the fabric grades themselves, our guide to blockout and light filtering fabrics breaks down what each one does before you commit.
Start with how dark the room needs to be and when. Everything else follows from that. See roller blinds online, enter your window measurements and you’ll get a price straight away.
