Modern Furniture

For an elegant but economical window treatment you can try to install matchstick blinds in a window frame and hung a pair of heavy starched white linen panels in front. Sunlight could slip through the matchstick blinds, hut when the linen drapery was drawn, the bedroom had privacy.

Neither the blinds nor the linen was costly-but both looked it because of one key detail: give the floor-length linen curtains an ultra-deep hem. A hem should be of 14 inches if your ceiling feels low, 20 inches if it’s high, or anywhere between that looks right to your eye.

Good curtain is like a favorite dress. It drapes handsomely, looks well made even if it’s Shaker-simple, tempts you to touch the fabric, and suits the window it was made for.

How do you decide what your windows should wear? Here is a good advice: if the room has a lot going for it-great art, furniture, or architecture-you should simplify the window treatments; If the room is not that outstanding, go ahead and really decorate the window.

Remember that dressing your living room windows is a little like getting dressed up yourself for the theater: finery isn’t required, but a certain attention must be paid to style, quality, and tailoring. You can do without frills and formality, which in the language of curtains means swags, jabots, and voluptuous valances. But good fabrics, modern furniture and good construction, are essential.

Sometimes it’s not sun but the curiosity of neighbors that you wish to thwart. To create privacy without vanquishing the sunlight, you can try to install simple white shades that pull up from the bottom. (Any window-treatment specialist can install shades this way.) When halfway up, they grant privacy while giving you a glimpse of the sky.

Darkness on Sunday mornings. Bright sun on Monday. Privacy from the neighbors, but also a view— we do ask a lot of our bedroom curtains. And it helps, of course, if they have a romantic or peaceful quality that makes the bedroom more of a sanctuary. Not every trade secret in this chapter can meet all these requirements. Depending on your needs, you may have to (a) prioritize or (b) combine treatments—using, for example, an opaque shade behind a sheer drapery.

Now for the easy part: You can dress a bedroom window with less effort than a window in a living or dining room. Consider a blowsy length of gauze tossed over a rod: in the living room, it can look insubstantial, but in the bedroom, it suggests a veil. Delicacy works in the privacy of a bedroom, and delicate fabrics (think linen, lace, and sheers) are often reasonably priced.

Simplicity works, too. A surprising number of houses and apartments by top designers have bedroom windows dressed only in pristine white schoolhouse shades, the kind you may recall from your third-grade classroom, If the shades are custom-made for a tailored fit, you’ll find that the understatement works.

Try not to overcoordinate. If you make curtains to match your patterned sheets, the room will look predictable—and after a while you’ll tune out that gorgeous pattern. Let window treatments stand on their own. If you still crave coordination, do something overscaled and unexpected: cut an 18-inch-high band from the patterned sheets and sew it across the base of starched white curtains. You’ll have broken out of a formula, and the details of your decorating will stand out the better for it.