When You Should not Hang Curtains In A Room
Some spots simply are not strong for a curtain panel. If it cannot hang all the way to the ground, sometimes it can make a room feel awkward to hang a not-quite-full-length curtain panel. There are certainly exceptions where cafe curtains can look truly sweet, but we generally simply go whole-hog (full curtains from floor to nearly-ceiling) or skip curtains entirely in that spot. So if you have a spot like that, and you are wondering what we’d do instead of a curtain panel, this post is full of photos and info for you.
Take our dining room, for example, which has two heat registers right where curtains would hang, as well as a window that is especially close to the corner – so the panel would cover a lot of the window instead of having a wall to hang in front of:
We simply skipped curtains in there and went with woven shades. The room still flows nicely with other rooms nearby, since we kept the woven shades consistent throughout the first floor of our house.
For example, these are the same shades in the kitchen (you can read more on our curtain reno here):
Clearly we could not have long curtains hanging down from those kitchen windows since they’d hit the counter – so we simply went with the pleasant warm texture that shades brought in.
And here is the living room, which DID have room for pleasant long curtains (and we enjoy the softness they add), so we did BOTH in here. The woven shades tie into the other spaces that also have them with or without curtains…
… like our home office, which also has both.
Our home office is in fact a pleasant room to use as an example that you do not have to treat all windows in the same room the exact same way. See how the windows along that right wall would not have room for curtain panels and the cork board (they’d in short cover the area where the cork board is, if we hung them wide so they did not entirely block the window?). So we simply skipped them on that wall. Still looks fine having them around the bay window and not around those front windows, which also have heat registers that the curtains would have blocked on both sides. So it worked out simply fine. It is kinda like the bay window is the star, and the front windows are simply supporting actors.
The woven blinds are not for privacy or light blocking (our house is fairly far from other houses so we only hoped light blocking and privacy in the upstairs rooms (bathrooms & bedrooms) but you can get lined woven blinds or roman shades to provide privacy and block light. Or you can do what we do upstairs, which is to layer in some white faux wood blinds that we hang inside mounted (within the frame of the window). We did that all over the beach house & the duplex too – they are strong for privacy and look quite clean and pleasant when they are layered with curtains…
… or when they are simply hung alone in a bathroom or something.
My closing lesson would be: general curtain guidelines and a trick to hang them more easily & swiftly can be handy, but when it comes to the whole “what would look good in here” question, every single person might have a distinct challenge, layout, etc – so it is truly smart to have someone hold things up and step back and trust your eye. Try distinct heights. Stare at a picture of a certain window shade on your phone while standing in that room and looking at the window. Truly try to picture things before you commit. Heck, you can even try photoshopping distinct solutions or printing out a photo of your room and drawing right over it (sketch blinds or curtains right onto the pic with a marker- this is the original photoshop – ha!).
And do not forget to consider woven blinds or even a fairly patterned roman shade (like this) for certain spots where curtains would not quite work – and remind yourself that it is ok to simply take your time and figure things out as you go. So many of our rooms have had curtain/blind changes while we figure it out – so do not beat yourself up about it if it takes a second try.
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