Hard-core minimalists abhor curtains, preferring to keep their windows bare under nearly any circumstance. (When absolutely necessary, install blinds.) Yet curtains are functional as well as decorative, regulating light, privacy, climate, and sound, as well as defining physical space in a flexible way. Curtains are also, of course, decorative, bringing color, texture, and pattern. Buildings are fixed, but curtains move. They pull open and shut, they billow in the breeze, and they change transparency as the sun shifts. These soft complements to hard architecture are sensual in every sense of the word—they shape our lived, bodily experience of a space, not just visually, but through touch, sound, and temperature. Curtains can represent a substantial outlay of time and money, and yet they are by nature temporary, destined to dissolve, eventually, under the rays of the sun. (Meanwhile, they can guard your furniture against similar decline.)
Choosing draperies or sewing them at home is an area where women have customarily held sway, along with other soft-goods decisions like pillows and bed linens. Women have been the artists and inventors of the modern curtain, turning this humble medium into an experimental form, as seen in countless home decorating guides as well as in high-end installations by curtain innovators such as Lilly Reich, Mary Bright, and Petra Blaisse, who have constructed curtains using unusual materials and techniques. Blaisse, who designs gardens as well as curtains, sees the trees and grasses outdoors as elements of window treatment, since they affect light, shade, and view inside the building.
A window is a frame, and a curtain is a frame around a frame. What do frames do, and why do we need them? Frames separate works of art from the ordinary world. A frame can be thick or thin, light or dark. It can meld with the environment or blend with the image it supports. Contemporary art galleries often dispense with pedestals and picture moldings, and yet the white, open space of the gallery is itself a frame that announces art’s special status. A well-designed curtain doesn’t hide the window, but rather dramatizes it, calling attention to the presence of the outside world. Sometimes, it creates the illusion of a window when none is there. EL
THE MODERN CURTAIN, 1927
Lilly Reich designed this interior for a model apartment building in Germany. (The building was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with whom she was a frequent collaborator.) Here, a floor-to-ceiling drapery serves as a flexible room divider, while translucent panels diffuse light from the outside. Reich designed the curtains as well as the tubular steel furniture pieces.
THE MODERN CURTAIN, 1946
Many inspiring decorating books were published in the mid-twentieth century. These books delivered modernist design ideas to homemakers and college girls. One of our favorites is Popular Home Decoration, by Mary Davis Gillies. The designs shown here use curtains with extra length and width to enhance the apparent size of the windows. Similar techniques are employed in many contemporary hotel rooms, where a wall of drapes helps make a small window with an ugly view of the parking lot look sweeping and dramatic.
THE MODERN CURTAIN, 2000
Curtains don’t have to be all the same length. Designer Mary Bright worked with numerous architects and interior designers at the turn of the twenty-first century to create stunning window treatments like this one for a New York City restaurant. Overlapping panels of sheer fabric hang from thin chains. She often used unorthodox materials such as paper, rubber, leather, metal mesh, and teflon-coated nylon. Bright, who began her career as a milliner, was an expert seamstress as well as designer. She died of cancer in 2002 at age 48.
Just like people, not all windows look better naked. The length and width of a curtain, like the cut of a jacket or a dress, changes the way a window is perceived. Different styles can make a plain-Jane window look amorous, glamorous, extravagant—or downright dowdy. Modern curtains tend to hang long and straight. They are translucent rather than opaque, serving to diffuse light rather than to block it.
NUDE
TOPLESS Functional, not frilly, the café curtain is an easy start for those who are drapery-adverse. Covering just half your window provides privacy while letting in lots of light.
HAUS FRAU This old-fashioned look is coming back (along with fluffy skirts, flirty aprons, and frosted cupcakes). Falling just above the sill, the short, perky cut of this curtain emphasizes the window’s inherent body shape.
LIKE A VIRGIN Sheer fabric panels diffuse light and eliminate glare, creating a luminous field in place of a harsh, bright hole in the wall. Sheer panels that hang a little wider and longer than the frame will enhance the apparent size of the window opening. A white-on-white pattern adds interest without changing the color of the room.
A draped valance or a tailored cornice serves to create an illusion of height or obscures hardware. Like a hair extension or a comb-over, a valance is primarily about illusion.
PRINCESS It’s draperies like these that give curtains a bad name.
DIVA Tall panels of fabric fall into puddles on the ground, projecting an aura of glamour and an illusion of height.
Works of art are deeply personal elements of the domestic interior. A well chosen and well cared for artwork could be part of your family legacy for generations. Yet any painting or photograph will suffer if it is poorly installed. Shown here are some common mistakes that are easily avoided with attention to basic design principles: scale, balance, simplicity, and hierarchy.
Avoid overpowering a delicate work of art with a heavy, ornate frame.
Don’t hang a large artwork over a small table, or a tiny artwork over a massive sofa.
Never arrange art in a stair step pattern except over stairs.
Don’t make works of art compete with a carnival of curios.
Don’t obscure art behind a door that is usually left open.
Never hang objects over a child’s bed, especially not a large, depressing object.
THE NEO PORCH Nicer than a garage facade, but can it really deliver the neighborliness it promises?
