How to Choose Curtains Styles According to House Architecture

How to Choose Curtains Styles According to House Architecture

The architecture of your house will have a lot to do with your decision on window treatment, as you will want to use your draperies and curtains to bring out the best qualities of the architecture from the exterior as well as from the interior, Thus, white ruffled tied-back organdies and other sheer materials are still, perhaps, the most effective curtains for a Cape Cod Colonial house. But today many young couples who really want modern small houses are forced to accept the modified Colonial types, since in most sections of the country small modern houses are not yet within reasonable price brackets. It is possible to give such a home an intriguing modern appearance with, for example, vivid plain fabric draw- draperies across a breezeway, a modern print at the picture window, and so forth. But caution should be used in combining decorating styles as expressed by your curtains, and architectural styles. Certainly it is incongruous to hang looped-back damask draperies in a ranch style house, just as it is inappropriate to have ruffled organdie in an Italian villa.

As far as possible, without making the interior dull, it is a good idea to make the curtains alike in both shape and general style, since it is distracting to see in one facade looped-back, straight-hanging, Dutch style, and various other treatments. If your styles do vary from room to room, however, use glass curtains of the same color throughout the house, and this will help achieve unity on the exterior.

How to Choose Curtains Styles According to House Architecture

From the interior, too, the window treatments should have a certain amount of uniformity, especially in those houses where rooms open into one another, or where there is a dining area as part of the general living space, as in many new, small homes. This is especially true of the ranch type house, where all the rooms are on the same floor. It does not mean that you need use the same print throughout, or the same fabric or color, but there should be a correlation of materials and textures, and a blending of colors. If, for example, draperies are featured in the living room, of linen of smoke gray with chartreuse and hunter green leaf patterns in the print and a chartreuse moss fringe, the adjoining dining area can have plain smoke gray linen drapes with chartreuse fringe, or chartreuse draperies with gray fringe, and possibly a valance and tiebacks that repeat the leaf pattern.

Casement cloth, or glass curtains, as mentioned, give the house not only uniformity from the outside, but also on the interior.