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Here I go with another opinion that may be unpopular with my US readers. I didn't realize just how bad we are in America with this cheesy norm until I lived in Europe and realized that we, in this great country, overlook as just an aesthetic convention, what is actually very useful. Shutters.
More than just accessories to a window, they are quite handy. Until I stayed in an apartment in the beautiful hills of Tuscany, I couldn't comprehend how wonderful shutters are. In that apartment there were no curtains, just real wood shutters with a little gold handle. I never realized that they could serve a very useful purpose, keeping daylight and peeping Toms out, yet still allowing air circulation. So I went home and I started wondering why we don't have shutters in the US. I began to formulate the answer.
We used to have shutters. Old homes have shutters. Granted I've always lived in the south and maybe it's because people down here just love to run their air conditioner and it's too buggy to leave windows open. I started to notice that a lot of houses have shutters on their façade and that's all it is. It is nothing more than a façade. This started to make me mad. That's when I googled it and found a fellow fake shutter hater.
Scott Sidler's The Craftsman Blog goes into great detail about why fake shutters are terrible. He enumerates even more reasons than I had thought of. The biggest reason why they are awful is simply because THEY DON'T WORK! If you also realize that they don't even fit the window, that makes them especially stupid.
Please, please, please do not use fake shutters on your custom home. If you insist on having them, at least make sure that they actually look like they would fit your window. Thank you. That's all for now.