BEHIND CURTAIN NUMBER ONE

An Interior Designer that hates curtains is about as rare as a race car driver who hates driving, but here's the deal, I just don't like them!  I've always thought windows were great opportunities to frame the beauty outside your window, so when people cover them with heavy, funeral-parlor-like curtains, it just makes me squirm.  However, there are often times where curtains perform an important role, like keeping a room warm in the winter, cool in the summer or protecting the inhabitants from wandering eyes outside.  A dear friend of mine called me to help cover her solarium windows and after taking a look at them, I knew it would far exceed her budget to install custom, motorized blinds (roughly $1,200/window panel) so I told her to just enjoy the great outdoors and embrace the view.  As fall arrived this year so did her privacy as leaves jumped off neighboring trees to reveal..guess who…the neighbors!  To find an inexpensive alternative to expensive blinds or tacky curtains, Abbie jumped on www.etsy.com and found a fantastic seamstress in Maine who custom sewed four panels of gorgeous linen fabric for only $100! (Abbie sent dimensions and chatted back and forth a bit about fabric choices, but the entire process took less than three weeks www.leightonpointlinen.etsy.com).  While I'm not a huge fan of curtains, I love privacy…so this solution was priceless!