While window treatments are often considered a finishing touch to a room, it’s a mistake to think of them as merely decorative. Window treatments that are adapted to each room in your home are foundational elements that can impact your daily quality of life. Today many spaces feature bare windows that allow natural light to flood in for a clean modern feel that shuns the fussy window dressing of times past.
But naked windows can leave you cold, expose you to excess UV rays, and fail to provide the necessary privacy for street-facing or neighbor-adjacent rooms. Adding window treatments such as curtains, drapes, shades, blinds, or shutters that are adapted to your home and decor can do everything from providing light and privacy control to helping keep your home warmer in winter and cooler in summer without wasting energy.
From modern curtains to unique blinds, find the perfect solution for your home with these window treatment ideas for every budget, style, and space.
What Is a Window Treatment?
A window treatment is a fancy term for anything you use to dress your naked windows. Everything from roller shades to shutters to blinds to black-out curtains or drapes, or any combination of the above, can be called a window treatment (or window dressing, to use another term).
How to Choose a Window Treatment
To choose the best window treatments for each room, start by identifying practical concerns such as how much privacy, light, and temperature control you need for each window. Keep in mind that south-facing rooms will require more shading than those facing east, for example.
Prioritize rooms such as bedrooms and bathrooms to ensure that you are able to relax and sleep, using black-out shades for the bedroom and privacy blinds or half-curtains for the bathroom. You can layer simple blinds with curtains for a more decorative look, or to give yourself options for light and privacy control throughout the day.
Remember that windows come in a variety of shapes and anything but standard sizes, making buying off-the-rack shades and shutters challenging and custom curtains, drapes, and blinds relatively expensive. Be sure to measure twice before buying anything you can’t return, and keep in mind that there are many professional companies who will do the work of measuring and installing blinds if you have the budget and plan to stay in your home for a while, or forever. And if you have the desire and the budget, choose motorized smart blinds that can open and close at the touch of a button.
