Decoration and Curtains Styling

Decoration and Curtains Styling

Your decorative scheme is bound to influence your choice of fabric and the way you drape your windows.

Today it becomes increasingly difficult to label a room as Modern, Provincial, Directoire, or anything else. Modern rooms, no matter what the period is, have in common a smoothness and directness that separates them sharply from the cluttered rooms of other periods. Modern colors give them a contemporary feeling, no matter what the source of design. Some of the loveliest rooms combine the best in furniture and accessories from more than one period. You too, in all probability, have not felt that it was necessary to stick slavishly to any one period or style. It is much more likely that your home has taken its cue from the part of the country in which you live, whether you live in a city apartment or country house, and from your family's tastes and needs.

Nevertheless your window styling can pick up whatever style idea is dominant in your home, and in each room. Let's take the living room first.

Suppose you have a modern room. Limitless pos-sibilities emerge as to pattern or fabric and color, but in draping you are more or less confined to straight hanging draperies and glass curtains. You will want to avoid ruffles, shillings, festoons, and fancy tiebacks. If you have Chinese modern furniture, for example, glass curtains of raw silk shantung and draperies of solid-color damask with a weave that brings lines that resemble bamboo to the surface are possibilities. Or if you live in the Southwest, or in the country, and have a Modern room in which natural colors and textures predominate (such as exposed stone walls, great fireplaces, rush matting, bamboo blinds) you will want one o the modern hand-blocked or screen painted fabrics, perhaps in a Peruvian, Mayan, Guatamalan, or some other primitive print in one color against a natural ground. If your room is a more sophisticated kind of Modern, as in a city apartment, you may want one of the exciting abstract Modern designs. When tiebacks are necessary, use chunky pieces of brass, clear plastic, or simple wood, and avoid anything gadgety or fussy. In Modern fabric patterns, look for something simple that is, at the same time, not obvious a pattern that, because the artist has been clever, does not seem too repetitive.

Modern in feeling, but at quite the other end of the scale, is the classic style, in which the patterns suggest Grecian urns, classical columns, and figures. This style calls for delicately-draped hangings, swags, or festoons, falling in soft folds down the sides and some- times lying along the floor. They can be created in sheer materials and in richer brocades and hammered failles.

Decoration and Curtains Styling

If your room is Provincial, ruffles are very good, of course, and they can be deep, wide and plentiful. Sash glass curtains on a brass rod are attractive in a Provincial room, echoing the brass accents of accessories. There are very many attractive small-patterned fabrics on the market for Provincial rooms, in toile de Jouy and other documentaries and in Americana. Large curving cornices padded and covered with fabrics of the same pattern are attractive.

For formal rooms of period style, as Italian Directoire, Empire, Louis XV, or Georgian, draperies may be looped back in a more elaborate manner, and richer smooth-faced fabrics such as pure silks, antique taffetas and damasks may be used, as well as the newly fashionable laces and nets. Windows for these rooms are lavishly covered by lightweight glass curtains topped by contrasting valances which sweep across wide areas, or for narrow windows are made up of crisscrossed asymmetrical fabric lengths. Over-scaled brass or dark mahogany rods with minaret ends give an impressive air to these treatments.

If your family uses the living room for quiet evenings at home, for reading, sewing, and other activities of this nature, avoid patterns and colors that are too gay or lively. If on the other hand, you do much entertaining, and your living room is more formal, you can afford more exaggerated draping styles, and bolder, more dramatic color.

In the bedroom, patterns and colors should be restful. Here, of course, you will want to choose draperies that are most attractive to the member of the family whose room it is. Sturdy .cottons, ranging from sail-cloth and duck to monk's cloth, can be used in children's rooms, and in your son's and daughter's rooms where modern prints will be appreciated. Your teenage daughter may prefer a room which is more of a study and entertaining area, decorated in simple Modern styles with abstract-patterned draperies, to the conventional young girl's frilly room. Your own room may be as soft and inviting and luxurious as your wish can make it, with lustrous rayon satin or taffeta draperies to match quilted flounced spreads and dressing table.

Kitchens, as always, can be curtained informally with sash curtains, Dutch curtains and short, straight- hung curtains of lightweight materials, with gay trimmings. Kitchens are becoming less clinical, and now Provincial small-patterned drapery curtains will go with pine-panelled walls, and candy-striped chintzes, semi-abstract fruit and flower designs, and other bolder patterns and fabrics are used, particularly in a kitchen which has a dining space.