Okay, friends. Allow me to put on my teacher hat for a minute to talk about the correct way to hang curtain rods. It’s possible you already know what I’m about to say, and if so just click on. But this is an area where, as a stager and decorator, I often see people making mistakes. Many people run their curtain rod right above the window and the panels barely extend past the glass. Which is fine but when that happens we lose the opportunity to flatter our spaces as much as we could by simply changing how we hang our curtains. 😊
Here is a picture demonstrating what most people do:
And good grief, of course that’s what many people do because this is an image from curtain panels for sale on Wayfair!!! If we are buying curtains from pictures like this it makes sense that it’s also how we install them. But our rooms can look so much warmer, larger, and attractive if we just change how long we run the rod, how high we hang it, and where the curtain panels fall.
Let’s look at another example of what NOT to do when hanging curtains:
(photo from centsationalgirl.com)
Notice how the rod is hung right above the window frame? And do you also see how much wall space is then between the top of the rod and where the ceiling and rod meet? This is NOT what we want.
Okay. Now that we are on the same page, we need to poke at what makes the difference. “So how exactly do I need to hang my curtains?!?!”
Here is an example from Chris Loves Julia of what we DO want to do, when the rod is hung just below the ceiling line.
Image from Chris Loves Julia
What a difference, right!? The room looks more grown up, more substantial, and it looks like they know what they’re doing. (Newsflash: Chris Loves Julia DEFINITELY knows what they’re doing. They’re an endless source of inspiration to me, both on their blog and on their Instagram account.
But let’s pay attention to the fact that the rod is mounted right below the ceiling- some designers I know even like to hang the curtain rods FROM the ceiling. I don’t personally like to go that far, but the tip of my curtain panels are brushing my ceiling in my own house, that’s how high I’m going. You also see how the curtain panels begin at the edge of the window and then run the length of the walls on either side? Some of us don’t have a layout to be able to do this, but curtain panels should DEFINITELY be wide enough to take up 2 feet or more of the wall space on either side of your windows. And where possible, you can even just run one really long rod the entire length of the room, dropping panels to flank each window as they come. This move is especially one I like to bust out for master bedrooms where lush fabrics and soft fabrics are extra important.
I found this graphic on geranium.com and it’s communicating exactly what I’m saying. The window on the right looks much grander, and the only difference is 1)placement of the rod, 2)how far past the window the rod goes, and 3)curtain placement.
Do you know what all this means? It means the 87” curtain panels and 42” curtain rods aren’t going to cut it for most standard windows in our homes! It means we look at the 91” or 94” or even 96”-101” panels, depending on the height of our ceilings. Make good friends with a seamstress near you, or take the cheat way and buy some hem tape and just tape the curtain hems up to the right length yourself, if you need to. The reality is that it’s very rare to buy curtain panels so that they perfectly fit your space without hemming. And it means that the 72-114” curtain rod is going to be your new go-to rod above every standard window.
It also means that our spaces are going to feel so much better- and LOOK so much better- and that’s definitely worth it, if you ask me. Happy hanging, friends. :)