Treat Your Windows Right: Five Tips for Your Interior Redesign
October 4, 2018
Redecorating your space? Ready to update the living room, or change the way your entire home looks and feels? When you’re making a fresh start, take the advice you’ll hear from any professional decorator: don’t neglect your window treatments.
Windows are the soul of your interior spaces. In every room, the treatments you choose for them – blinds, curtains, or shades – will enhance and transform your space, altering light, colour and mood.
Here are five window treatment tips to consider when redesigning or redecorating in your home.
Tip #1: Get Some Height
If you want to make your ceilings look higher, buy floor-to-ceiling curtains that are custom tailored to your room. They draw the eye up and down, and lend your space a feeling of tallness and height. Make sure that your curtains reach the floor or come very close, to within a half-inch to a quarter-inch.
Depending on your tastes, you may prefer that your curtains not only reach the floor but “break,” puddling with an overlap of one or two inches. This can be an elegant option, depending on how the room is used. If you have small children or pets that might trample on it, it’s best to keep the curtain just above the floor.
Tip #2: Blinds or shades?
First, what’s the difference? Blinds are made of hard vanes or slats that “stack” when pulled up to reveal the window. Shades are generally made of one piece of soft material. Roller shades (you guessed it) are drawn up onto a roll, while honeycomb shades – also known as cellular shades – are gathered up or down.
Blinds are an excellent choice in your newly decorated space if you want to be able to control the amount of light coming into a room. You can open the adjustable vanes in the morning to let in daylight, or close them in mid-day to block too much hot sun.
Wooden-slat blinds, especially those with wide slats offer a classic appearance that will go well with a summery, tropical aesthetic. If you’re going for a cooler, more modern look, try neutrally coloured blinds with thinner slats.
Shades can do something that blinds can’t: they can soften and alter the tone of the light coming into your room. Honeycomb shades, like those in the Hunter Douglas Alustra® collection, come in a curated variety of design-inspired textures and colors to suit your furnishings and interior palette – and by trapping air they also offer an insulating quality to mediate temperature.
Tip #3: Sliding doors
Laying out a new look in a room with sliding doors? Traditionally these are well-matched with vertical-slat blinds to match their orientation, but you can also consider a more contemporary look with gliding track window panels. Track panels are lightweight, and slide easily. The Skyline® series of gliding panels by Hunter Douglas comes in over 600 fabric styles and woven textures to match any aesthetic.
Tip #4: Having it all
When choosing shades to match your new interior you can opt for a neutral color, or go for a shade that matches the colour that is most dominant in the room. Hunter Douglas shades come in a wide variety of hues and colours, allowing you to achieve a great match. In an intimate bathroom space, you can match your shades to your coloured trim, and even your towels! Professional consultants like those at Arlene’s can help you navigate all the options.
Remember that you don’t have to choose between shades and curtains: you can have both. You can give your room a pop of colour with curtains while relying on neutral roller shades to mediate light.
Tip #5: Tricky windows
Windows come in all kinds of sizes and in so many locations—and some are trickier than others. Take arched windows, for example. They are beautiful and attractive, but sometimes they require shading, particularly if located in a bedroom. You can try pleating a sheer covering from the bottom center of the arch and fanning it out to soften the light— and on the lower, rectangular portion using another style of window treatment that complements it, like Roman shades.
Dormer windows and window seats can be made more attractive with the addition of Roman shades as well, or a combination of woven shades and curtains.
There are so many kinds of windows to work with: corner windows, bay windows, cathedral windows. Windows in your utility room, even in your shower. Our professional design consultants can assist you in finding solutions for them all, no matter how tricky.
Let us know how we can help make your new design everything you want it to be! You can give us a call, drop into one of our showrooms here in the Lower Mainland, or click here for a complimentary consultation.