Front tilt or hidden tilt

How each one works

Front tilt (the traditional rod). A slim vertical rod runs down the face of the panel, hinged to every blade. Nudge one blade or the rod itself and the set follows. It is the mechanism shutters grew up with: visible, legible, and exactly what a double-hung sash window expects to see beside its own cords and pulleys.

Hidden tilt (the geared stile). The linkage moves inside the stile, the panel's vertical edge, so the blades read as one clean uninterrupted plane. Tilt any blade and the gearing carries the rest. Nothing crosses the louvres, nothing catches the eye, and nothing catches the cleaning cloth either.

The era rule

Period window, front tilt. New build, hidden. Mixed house, room by room.

The rule is aesthetic, not mechanical; both mechanisms are robust and both are made to measure. A visible rod on a 2020 window looks like a costume; a bare blade plane inside 1890s architraves can look like a missing part. Match the mechanism to the window's own era and the shutter disappears into the house, which is the goal.

The exceptions prove it. A renovated terrace with a new glass extension takes front tilt at the front and hidden at the back, and the join never shows because no one sees two rooms at once. And wet areas take hidden tilt regardless of era, because a wipe-clean surface outranks a period detail over a shower. The reasoning lives in the wet-area guide.

Split tilt: one panel, two zones

Add a mid-rail, the horizontal bar across the panel, and the blades above and below it tilt independently. Top half open to the sky, bottom half closed to the footpath: the standard setting for street-facing rooms from Cooks Hill to Fletcher. On tall terrace windows we place the mid-rail to the sash's own meeting rail, so the shutter's geometry answers the window's.

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Tilt and width travel together; read the louvre width guide next, or let the window schedule apply the era rule to your rooms automatically.