The interior decoration of a home is never complete without curtains and drapery. Curtains enhance the environment of a home by adding to its overall decor. Curtains and drapes, when done tastefully and proportionately, add to the specialty and uniqueness of a room. An integral part of home décor, curtains and drapes can make or break an entire room. Hence a lot of care and attention needs to be paid to this aspect.

Curtains help in manipulating the light that enters the living room, keep the warmth or coldness inside it or increase the room’s privacy. Selecting the wrong fabric, however, could affect the over-all appearance while failing to provide several necessary functions.

Curtains vs Drapes

Most laymen call any fabric hanging on their windows as curtains while professional interior decorators in the industry call them drapes. The difference is however not limited to just terminology; it includes how they are used to add to the overall look and feel of the place they are displayed in.

While curtains are typically used to describe just the cloth hangings on the windows, the term drapery generally comprises the entire complement of curtains as well as their accessories such as valances and the hardware. When selecting the drapes or curtains for your home, one must always identify the function of that particular fabric type.

We have so much of choice in the wide range of curtain fabrics, tracks, rods, and styles for drapes that it can often be confusing as to where to start looking out which curtains best suit our home.

Curtains are generally made with lighter materials and more functional when compared with drapes. Drapes are usually made from heavy fabrics such as velvet or cotton tend to be longer than regular curtains and add grandeur to any room.

If used creatively, curtains could be used as the main attraction point of the window decoration. Always keep in mind that a set of drapes and valences has to be more ornate, in comparison to simple curtains. Thus they naturally have more elaborate designs and different fabric texture that demonstrate their primary purpose of decoration.

Another criterion for selecting your drapes or curtains is the type of fabric you are most comfortable working with. Apart from your personal taste, the fabric selection also depends on whether you want them to stand out from the rest of the living room or to blend with the rest of the room. Much also depends on the location of the windows.

Fabrics are available in an array of types but not all fabrics could be used as drapes. So be discriminative in choosing yours. In the selection of curtains, it is also crucial that you know the length and the width of the window on which they will be used.

Full length drapes should have the length and width that would cover the entire area of the window, from the top edge of the window and perhaps touching the floor. Apron drapes, however, would only require a modest allowance to the fabric to give it a dramatic flow.

Go ahead and get the right selection of curtain fabrics, curtains and drapes for your home.