How to Choose Curtains and Blinds for a New Home
You have the keys, the windows are bare, and every room is visible from the street after dark. It is the most urgent thing in the house and usually the last thing anyone plans for, because it is the one purchase you cannot make in advance. Everything else can be bought before you move. Curtains and blinds have to be measured in the room they will hang in.
So the question is not what you like the look of. It is what each window is being asked to do.
Blinds or curtains, or both
The quickest way to decide is to ask what the window needs when it is covered.
Blinds control light. They sit tight to the glass, they take up no wall, and they are the better answer in a kitchen, a bathroom, a utility, a landing, and any window where a radiator or a worktop sits directly underneath. A roller or a Roman in a wipeable fabric will outlast anything softer in a room with steam in it.
Curtains control everything else. They hold heat, they soften sound in a room with hard floors and fresh plaster, and they change the proportions of a wall in a way a blind cannot. In a living room or a bedroom they do more work than people expect.
Both together is normal and often correct. A blind for privacy and light control during the day, curtains for warmth and shape in the evening. The usual mistake is treating it as a choice when the two do different jobs.
Where the pole goes decides how the room reads
This is the decision that changes a room most, and it costs nothing to get right.
Hang the pole higher and wider than the opening. Higher, and the window reads taller and the ceiling further away. Wider, and the curtains stack back onto the wall rather than across the glass, so you keep the daylight you paid for. Hung tight to the frame, curtains swallow the light and the window looks smaller than it is.
Full length nearly always beats sill length, even in a small room, because the eye follows the line to the floor and stops where the floor is, not halfway up the wall. The exception is the window with a radiator or a run of units beneath it, which is where a blind belongs.
A blind fitted inside the reveal makes the window look smaller. Fitted outside it, the window looks the size it actually is. Inside the reveal is still right when the recess is deep and the window is wide, so this is a judgement rather than a rule, but it is worth knowing which way the decision pushes.
Fabric weight does as much as colour
A lined curtain falls in a column and holds that shape for years. An unlined one creases from the first week and never recovers.
Beyond lining, weight is the variable that matters. Wool and velvet hang heavy and quiet. Linen blends move more and crease by design, which reads as relaxed in a bedroom and untidy in a formal room. Sheers and voiles diffuse light rather than block it, so they solve daytime privacy without making the room dark. Interlining adds warmth and body, and in a room that feels cold in January it earns its place.
Blackout is a lining, not a fabric, so you are not choosing between blackout and something you like the look of. In a bedroom, specify it and then choose the fabric separately.
See it in the room before you commit
Fabric behaves differently in a new build to how it behaves in a showroom, because the light is different and the walls are still bright white.
Get samples, tape them up at the window, and look at them twice. Once in the morning with the light behind them, once at night with the lamps on and the light in front of them. Most fabrics that fail do so in the second condition rather than the first, and nobody sees that on a screen.
They do not all have to match
A common assumption is that a house wants one window treatment repeated throughout. It does not.
What suits a nursery will not suit a hallway. A bedroom wants blackout and weight. A landing wants privacy and nothing else. What holds a house together is a consistent approach to heading, pole height and drop, not a single fabric used eleven times. Cohesion comes from the decisions repeating, not the material.
The order it happens in
Measure after the floors are down, because floor height changes the drop. Decide blinds and curtains together rather than one now and one later, since the pole position affects whether the blind can be fitted outside the reveal. Then order, and expect it to take weeks rather than days, because made to measure means made.
If the windows are bare in the meantime, that is the normal state of a new build and we have written about why that happens and what to do in the gap. If you are still working out what to deal with first in the house, Where To Start In A New Build covers the order of play.
Measuring and fitting is a large part of what we do as interior designers in Bristol, for private homes across Bristol, Bath, Keynsham, Saltford, Nailsea and Portishead as well as for show homes.
Send us a photo of the window
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Stand back far enough to get the whole window and the wall either side of it, take one photo, and send it with the room it is in and what the window needs to do. Whether there is a radiator under it, how deep the recess is, and whether the room faces the street.
We will tell you whether it is a blind, curtains or both, how high the pole should go, and what the fabric needs to be doing in that particular room. For most homes in Bristol and Bath, measured to installed is a matter of weeks.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.