Modern Furniture

Darkness on Sunday mornings. Bright sun on Monday. Privacy from the neighbors, but also a view— we do ask a lot of our bedroom curtains. And it helps, of course, if they have a romantic or peaceful quality that makes the bedroom more of a sanctuary. Not every trade secret in this chapter can meet all these requirements. Depending on your needs, you may have to (a) prioritize or (b) combine treatments—using, for example, an opaque shade behind a sheer drapery.

Now for the easy part: You can dress a bedroom window with less effort than a window in a living or dining room. Consider a blowsy length of gauze tossed over a rod: in the living room, it can look insubstantial, but in the bedroom, it suggests a veil. Delicacy works in the privacy of a bedroom, and delicate fabrics (think linen, lace, and sheers) are often reasonably priced.

Simplicity works, too. A surprising number of houses and apartments by top designers have bedroom windows dressed only in pristine white schoolhouse shades, the kind you may recall from your third-grade classroom, If the shades are custom-made for a tailored fit, you’ll find that the understatement works.

Try not to overcoordinate. If you make curtains to match your patterned sheets, the room will look predictable—and after a while you’ll tune out that gorgeous pattern. Let window treatments stand on their own. If you still crave coordination, do something overscaled and unexpected: cut an 18-inch-high band from the patterned sheets and sew it across the base of starched white curtains. You’ll have broken out of a formula, and the details of your decorating will stand out the better for it.

The old-fashioned nursery had the right basic ideas. It was essentially a room given over to children for which most parents were content to provide, if they could, a well-ventilated space with somewhere to sleep, plenty of floor/play space, somewhere to sit, some sort of games, drawing, work surface and reasonable storage.

In a sense this sort of framework is still in force today - but with some big differences. First, many of the clever and colorful ideas produced for nursery and primary schools to provide in­tellectual stimulus for their pupils have begun to trickle back into the home in the form of educational play­things, body-building structures and early learn­ing apparatus. And second, children today belong to a tech­nologically sophisticated genera­tion where the computer is becom­ing as commonplace as the tele­vision, and where audio-visual equipment replaces building bricks and snakes and ladders almost as a matter of course.

This means that any forward planning at the infant stage should involve thinking at least about the probability of having to make room for such things. While it is impos­sible to project several years ahead and visualize exactly what amazing new inventions are going to invade our lives, let alone what size and shape they are going to be or how many extra electric points and out­lets they’ll need, what you can do is think in terms of flexible arrange­ments in the home.

Parents of young infants will find it difficult to imagine anything at all beyond the immediate world of nappies and feeds, cots and baths but it doesn’t last forever and if that’s all they’ve planned for, they’ll find the room soon out­grown and unsuit­able for the next stage in their children’s lives. The time, money and effort spent on creating a room the chil­dren don’t want to use will be wasted.

So, when you are faced with this empty room that you want to take care of your children’s needs for the next eighteen years, remem­ber, as you make your plans, that ad­aptability is the name of the game.

If noise from traffic or neighbors disturbs your peace in the bedroom, muffle it: cover the walls with fabric.

Your choices:

• Hire a fabric workroom or wall upholsterer. An expert will apply padded and fabric-wrapped panels to your walls or frame out the wall with wood strips to which the fabric is staple-gunned. It need not be all over the room, you can upholster just the wall that’s between you and the noise, or the wall behind your bed.
• Curtain the wall instead; it’s easier and soft-looking. The traditional method is to affix a brass rod under the crown molding, another above the baseboard; the fabric, tightly gathered, is held taut between the two. For extra soundproofing, staple batting up first.