Home Decorating For Dummies
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Curtains and draperies work hard at blocking light, sound, and temperature. In addition to these functions, they’re also extraordinarily decorative, adding enormous personality to a room through color, pattern, and texture.

When choosing a patterned fabric for a curtain, especially an unlined curtain, scrunch the fabric in your hand. Doing so allows you to see how the pattern will look when gathered or pleated as it hangs at your window and how it will look with light streaming behind it. Don’t wait until the fabric has been made into curtains and hung in your room to be surprised!

Traditionally, windows were treated to three types of curtains:

  • A sash curtain (usually sheer, to filter light and provide some privacy)

  • A draw curtain (to block out light)

  • An overdrapery (which was purely decorative and stationary or unfunctional).

Today, draperies usually open and close (or draw) and are called draperies (a noun) never drapes (a verb).

In very formal rooms (with sufficiently high ceilings), all the layerings of window treatments were topped with a cornice or valance (to hide the hardware). This Traditional (expensive) multilayered treatment carries on today in period or very formal or dressy rooms.

Curtains and drapes are readily available as ready-mades in stock or standard lengths to conform to typical window sizes and ceiling heights. Finding ready-mades (generally less expensive than custom curtains) that work in your decorating project is possible. Perhaps they need only customizing with trim that’s available from a drapery or fabric shop. Or, you can embellish them with appliques and ribbons with which you can embellish plain panels.

Custom curtains allow you to choose the exact fabric needed for your interior design. Check out curtain design books, which can help you in deciding how simple or how lavish to make your curtains. Before you begin your curtain search, know that curtain designs often are a matter of selecting a heading (pleats and other decorative devices for gathering fabric into the desired fullness when hung at the window). You can choose from many different headings, but these are the more familiar:

  • Brisby pleats: What curtain makers call the technique of pinching pleats at the top, where rings are attached.

  • French pleats: Narrow folds neatly stacked and attached together (usually in groups of three pulled together) allowing for sewing rings on top or attaching pins for a traverse rod behind.

  • Pencil pleats: Narrow columns of folds that are continuous across the top of the drapery panel. These pleats must be tied or held back because they don’t fold, stack, and stay in place.

  • Smocked heading: A smocking tape (a band of fabric with rows of cords that can be pulled, gathering material as the cords are pulled) creates a dressmaker’s touch.

Curtains and draw draperies are often topped off by a separate item that essentially hides hardware, but may serve additional decorative purposes:

  • Cornice: A cornice is an upholstered wood shape (usually architectural, but it may be entirely fanciful in design).

  • Lambrequin: Think of a cornice that extends to the floor, creating a shadow box effect and adding a sense of architecture to both Traditional and Contemporary interiors. Use lambrequins over bare windows, blinds, or full curtains.

  • Pelmet: A pelmet is an architecturally or artfully shaped fabric stiffened with buckram (a stiffly starched fabric that tailors and dressmakers use).

  • Valance: A valance is a soft, shortened version of a bedhanging or curtain that may be more elaborately pleated, shirred, gathered, and trimmed than the curtain over which it hangs. A valance may match your curtains in the same fabric, or you can coordinate it with your curtains with pattern, color, and/or texture. You can also line your valance with a contrasting fabric for some added oomph.

About This Article

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About the book authors:

Katharine Kaye McMillan, former senior editor of a New York City-based national magazine, is a writer whose work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers. She is a contributing writer to internationally circulated Florida Design Magazine. She is the co-author of several books on decorating and design, including Sun Country Style, which is the basis for licensed signature collections of furniture and accessories by three leading American manufacturers and importers. A graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, she holds a masters degree in psychology and is a doctoral student in psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.

Patricia Hart McMillan is a nationally known interior designer, whose interior design work for private clients, designer showcases, and corporations has appeared in publications worldwide, including the New York Times and USA Today. Known as a trend spotter and for clearly articulated views on design, she is quoted frequently and extensively in both trade and consumer publications. She a ppears on TV and talk radio. A prolific writer, she is coauthor and author of seven books on interior design and decoration, with Sun Country Style signature collections of furniture based on two books. She has taught decorating courses at several colleges and conducted numerous seminars across the U.S. She is decorating editor for Christian Woman Magazine and reports on design trends for The Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune newspaper based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. She has been editor-in-chief of two publications and was head of a New York City-based public relations firm representing some of the most prestigious names in home furnishing and building products. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a minor in art history (with an emphasis in architecture), from the State University of New York (New Paltz). She was awarded a certificate from The New York School of Interior Design.

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