Curtains & drapery

The hours cloth keeps

The blinds on this site are introduced by the hour they fix — six in the morning for blackout, two in the afternoon for solar screens. A curtain’s shift begins when those hours end. It is drawn at dusk and opened at breakfast, and everything it is best at happens in between: the black rectangle a bare window becomes once the lamps are on, the cold sliding off the glass at midnight, the last of a room’s warmth drifting toward a February pane.

A blind is adjusted all day. A curtain is closed once, and then it simply works until morning. That division is why nothing on this page competes with a blind — cloth is the other half of the day.

Cloth and a rail, not a mechanism

Everything else in our range is a machine at heart. A curtain is the exception: fabric cut and sewn to your window, moving sideways on a track or a pole, with nothing to jam and nothing to wear. The engineering has moved into the sewing.

And softness is not only a look. A room floored in wood or tile and walled in drywall and glass is a box of hard surfaces; sound reaches the window and bounces straight back in. Metres of folded cloth absorb some of that return — not soundproofing, nothing so grand, but the difference between a room that rings faintly and one that sits quiet is usually its textiles, and the window is often the last hard surface left.

The same folds are what make a window look furnished. A blind fits a window. A curtain dresses it.

Sewn to the track, not to the glass

The measuring surprise in custom drapery is that the window’s own width is nearly the least important number. A curtain is specified from the track — and the track is set deliberately wider than the opening, so the open curtain has wall to stand on instead of glass to cover, and deliberately higher, which draws the eye up and makes the window read taller than the builder left it.

Then comes the number nobody prints: fullness, the amount of cloth gathered across that width. Proper made-to-measure work runs to roughly twice the width of the track in fabric, which is what lets the cloth fall in real folds; starve the same expensive fabric of metreage and it hangs like a sheet, which is the true reason cheap curtains read as cheap. When we sew a pair, the drop is taken to your actual floor — in more than one place, because floors in this city are rarely level — the pattern is matched so it runs unbroken across the join, and the heading is chosen for the room: pinch pleat where it should look tailored, wave where it should look effortless, eyelet where it should look relaxed.

The layers you don’t see

A curtain is judged by its face fabric and made by its lining. Unlined cloth glows when the sun stands behind it and does nothing against the cold — the right answer for a sheer, and for very little else. A standard lining steadies the hang, shields the face fabric from the sun that would otherwise fade it, and turns the panel opaque at night. A blackout lining does what it says, and because the cloth closes to the wall past both edges of the window, a blackout-lined curtain often ends up darker than a blackout blind, which must leave running clearances a sewn edge does not.

Interlining — a soft blanket layer sewn between face and lining — is the luxury option with a plainly practical core: it traps still air across the whole window, which makes it the warmest thing you can hang indoors, and its weight gives the folds the depth that makes drapery photograph the way drapery photographs. Which layer a room needs is exactly what the in-home visit is for; a north bedroom, a draughty stair window and a formal front room all answer differently.

One window, two treatments

The setup we specify most often is not curtain or blind but both, keeping their separate hours at the same window. The blind — often a zebra or a blackout roller — takes the day: glare as the sun crosses, privacy while the street is awake, adjusted a dozen times without thought. The curtain is drawn once at dusk and takes the night: warmth held at the glass, the window turned back into furniture, real darkness in a bedroom if the lining was chosen for it.

The one requirement is that the two are planned together. Headrail, track and stacked cloth all compete for the same few inches of wall above and beside the glass. Decided at one measure, everything clears by design; decided in two separate purchases, the second one occasionally comes home unable to close over the first. It is a five-minute conversation standing at the window and an expensive discovery any other way.

What a curtain will not do

It will not manage the middle of the day. A curtain has two honest positions, open and drawn, and everything between is decoration — the fine hourly adjustments a room actually wants at two and again at five are blind work, which is why the pairing above exists at all.

It will not hang without proper fixings. A loaded track or pole is a lever, and it needs screws into something solid — cloth is the one member of our range with no no-drill answer, which is worth knowing before a conversation with a landlord.

And it will not leave you the whole window. Even fully open, the stacked cloth stands somewhere, and on a narrow opening in a small room that somewhere may be glass you cannot spare. When that is your window, we will say so at the measure and point you back at a blind — the free visit is where this whole page becomes specific to your rooms.