The Gaia is 247 Blinds' ultra blackout roller blind, pitched directly at rooms where controlling morning light matters. Available in 18 finishes with prices from £24.95, it sits in the accessible end of the 247 Blinds made-to-measure roller range. The "ultra blackout" label is the retailer's claim - as with any blackout fabric, the material itself blocks light transmission through the fabric, but how dark the room becomes will also depend on how the blind is fitted and how much light escapes around the edges.

Who it suits

Bedrooms are the obvious fit, particularly in households with early risers, young children, or shift workers. The UK's long summer mornings - dawn arriving before 5am by late May - make a genuinely opaque fabric worthwhile rather than decorative. A blackout roller hung outside the recess, with some overlap onto the surrounding wall, will give more darkness than one fitted inside a shallow recess.

Nurseries and children's rooms are another natural home for the Gaia. A roller blind is one of the simpler mechanisms to keep out of reach, and blackout fabric helps maintain sleep routines when daylight hours are long. UK cord-safety regulations require all domestically sold blinds to include a cord-safe solution - check that any blind you order for a child's room meets this requirement and look for cordless or wand-operated variants where available.

This range is less suited to living rooms or home offices where some natural daylight is welcome with the blind down. For those spaces, a light-filtering or dimout roller is usually a more practical choice, giving privacy and softened light without plunging the room into darkness mid-afternoon.

The colours

18 colours available

The three finishes - Flax, Sable, and Zephyr - sit at opposite ends of the warm-to-cool spectrum. Flax reads as a warm, sandy neutral, Sable as a deep near-black, and Zephyr as a cooler, lighter tone. The palette is deliberately restrained: none of the three is a bold or patterned option, which suits the range's purpose. A blackout blind in a bedroom tends to spend its life either fully down in the dark or rolled up and largely invisible, so a calm, unfussy colour is rarely a drawback.

Three finishes is a small selection compared with some retailers' blackout ranges. If you need something to complement a specific scheme precisely - say, a particular shade of grey or a warm taupe - it is worth checking the broader 247 Blinds roller collection before settling here, as other ranges may offer more variety.

Price by your dimensions

Enter your window size. We round up to the next standard size, which matches how the retailer actually quotes you.

At £24.95 for the smallest sizes, the Gaia sits at the accessible end of the made-to-measure market. As with all made-to-measure rollers, the price rises with width and drop, and the widget above shows the actual cost at your dimensions. Prices step up in standard-size increments rather than strictly linearly - a common practice across UK blind retailers - so rounding your measurement down to a lower size band (where the blind will still cover the window with outside-recess fitting) can sometimes reduce the final price.

How it compares

Within 247 Blinds' own range, the Gaia competes with other blackout roller options at similar price points. If you are comparing across retailers, most major UK made-to-measure blind sellers offer an entry-level blackout roller in a similar bracket, so the decision often comes down to which finishes best match your room.

If thermal performance alongside light blocking is a priority - particularly for an older property with single glazing - a cellular or honeycomb blind will insulate measurably better than any roller fabric. Rollers are not the strongest choice for conservatories either, where shade rather than darkness is usually the goal. For straightforward bedroom and nursery use, though, a blackout roller remains one of the most practical and cost-effective solutions in the UK market, and the Gaia covers that brief adequately.