Waterproof Faux-Wood Shutters for the Northern Irish Kitchen

Kitchens are the one room where we always steer customers away from hardwood shutters and towards our waterproof faux-wood range. It's not a lesser product — in a Northern Irish kitchen it's actually the better one.

Why not hardwood in a kitchen?

Hardwood shutters are our flagship — beautiful, insulating, and last a lifetime in a dry room. A kitchen is not a dry room. Steam from a boiling kettle, spray from the sink, splashes over the hob and cooking oils in the air will eventually swell any timber panel, no matter how well finished. Faux-wood — an engineered polymer composite with a hand-painted look — is impervious to all of it.

Where we use it

• Over the kitchen sink — the most-cleaned window in the house, and one splash-zone away from the tap.
• Above the hob — steam and heat every time you cook.
• In utility rooms — near the washing machine and tumble dryer, where humidity spikes.
• In en-suite bathrooms — same reasoning applies.
• Downstairs WC and boot rooms — anywhere condensation is a regular visitor.

Faux-wood vs blinds in a kitchen

A cheap blind over a kitchen sink lasts about eighteen months. Grease from cooking stains the fabric or coats the slats, water spots the surface, and the cord mechanism collects grime. A well-made faux-wood shutter is wiped clean with a damp cloth in ten seconds and looks brand new for a decade. On price-per-year it's simply not close.

Louvre size in a kitchen

63 mm is our most-requested kitchen size — small, tidy and easy to angle for privacy from a neighbour. For open-plan kitchens with a large picture window into the garden, we'll go 76 mm or 89 mm for more view-through when open.

Colour matching

Our faux-wood range comes in standard whites (Pure, Silk, Vanilla) but we colour-match to painted or lacquered kitchen cabinetry so the shutters read as joinery rather than a dressing. Farrow & Ball Cornforth, Little Greene French Grey Pale and Slaked Lime are the three colours we've fitted most in Portadown, Craigavon, Lisburn and Belfast kitchens in the last two years.

A kitchen shutter should behave like a kitchen appliance: work every day, wipe clean, last a decade.

The guarantee still applies

Every faux-wood set we fit — kitchen, bathroom, utility, en-suite — comes with the same 10-year craftsmanship guarantee as our hardwood range. Warping, hinge failure, tilt-rod mechanisms and finish are all covered.