Custom Shutters, Shades & Blinds in Eagle, ID

Window coverings built for Eagle homes

Eagle is home to some of the Valley’s largest long-term growth areas, including Valenova off Highway 16 and Avimor off Highway 55 — both expected to keep building for years, with long-range plans for that whole corridor between Highway 16 and Highway 55 to eventually connect. We work with homeowners across Eagle’s established neighborhoods and its newest ones alike.

What we install in Eagle

Custom homes mean custom measurements.

Eagle has the highest home values in the valley, and the large majority of its housing is single-family detached, most of it three or four bedrooms — but the raw numbers undersell it, because so much of Eagle is custom or semi-custom on acreage.

That is the whole difference. In a production subdivision the same window shows up in forty houses. In an Eagle custom, the great-room glass was drawn for that house and exists nowhere else. There is no shortcut and no catalog size. Every opening gets measured on site, and the quote is built from those numbers rather than from a plan.

Downtown Eagle was a chicken farm, and that is not a figure of speech.

In the early 1950s Reid Merrill put up a single laying house and bought a thousand hens. Merrill’s Egg Farm grew into one of the best-known industries in the Treasure Valley — hundreds of thousands of birds on sixty-eight acres, eggs going out to Albertsons and the local markets. Those sixty-eight acres are downtown Eagle. The main site stood about where the fire station is today.

An electrical fire at the end of November 1989 took most of it. The family rebuilt on four hundred acres in Emmett, and the ground here became Reid Merrill Park — land given back to the town that had kept the farm going for fifty years. There is still a rooster standing in it.

We bring it up because it explains the housing. Eagle had barely three thousand people in 1990 and has more than thirty thousand now, so the overwhelming majority of what we measure in this town went up after that farm burned. A small number of older homes near the original core, and then everything else — newer, larger, and drawn one house at a time.

The oldest houses in Eagle are few, and they are a different job.

Settlement here goes back further than the growth suggests. Truman Catlin homesteaded on Eagle Island in 1863 and turned it to dairy, which is what the island did for the next century. The Boise Valley Interurban ran its electric line out to Eagle in 1907 and carried mail and passengers until the automobile killed it in 1928. Floating Feather Airport opened in 1940 and closed in 1972.

What survives from those years is a handful of houses, and they behave like old houses anywhere. A century of settling means the openings are rarely square, the jambs are often shallow or trimmed in a way that rules out a standard inside mount, and no two windows in the same house can be assumed to match. Every one gets measured on its own. It is slower, and it is work we like.

The river runs through the middle of town, and the Greenbelt starts here.

The Boise River comes right through downtown. People fish it, float it and swim it all summer, and Reid Merrill Park puts most of that within walking distance of State Street. The west end of the Boise River Greenbelt sits right around Eagle Road, and from there the path runs roughly fifty miles along the water through Garden City and into Boise, finishing at Sandy Point below Lucky Peak.

That matters on a job more than you would expect. A house backing the river or the path has a view worth keeping and a steady stream of people walking past the back of it, and those two things pull in opposite directions. The answer is almost never a blind you raise and lower by hand. Solar shades hold the view and cut the glare, and top-down/bottom-up gives you privacy at eye level while the daylight keeps coming over the top. We would rather set that up once than have you fighting a cord every evening in July.

Highway 55, the bike park, and the side of town still going up.

Highway 55 leaves Eagle and becomes the road to McCall, which is a large part of why some people chose to live here in the first place. Eagle Bike Park sits on the edge of town, and new neighborhoods keep filling in around all of it.

New construction is a different job from a remodel. The openings are large and consistent, the great rooms run two stories, and most houses are handed over with nothing on the glass at all. That is the least expensive moment to do it properly, because the whole house can be treated as one package instead of one room at a time, and nothing has to be worked around. On the glass up high — the clerestory over a great room, anything above a stair — motorization is not a luxury item. It is the difference between a shade that gets used and one that stays open for ten years.

Shutters, and where they tend to land.

Plantation shutters are a permanent, built-in feature — joinery rather than soft goods. They work in any house, old or brand new; choosing them is a matter of personal style more than anything about the home. What they do give you is a clean line from the street and a finish that stays with the house.

In Eagle we see them most often on the rooms that face the street, where the exterior line matters as much as the inside view. We will still tell you where a different product does more work, though — on a two-story west-facing great room, a cellular or solar shade fights the heat better. That is a question about one window, not about the house.

Acreage changes the privacy question.

On a one-acre lot with mature trees, nobody is looking in. The problem is afternoon sun on the furniture and the floors, and winter heat loss through a great deal of glass. Cellular shades do real insulating work in both directions, and on a house with this much glazing that shows up on the power bill.

With homes this size, we are usually looking at twenty to forty openings. We will walk every one with you, tell you honestly which rooms need the premium product and which do not, and quote them separately so you can phase it if you want to.