French Chateau Dressing Room Drapes
Every house, large or small, seems to have a problem area that requires a little creativity to make it work. In the case of the French Chateau the problem area was a very small room with two odd windows. One window was on the front wall of the house and even though it was just a double-hung window, it took up the whole wall. The second was an odd bay with one small window on the side of the room. The bay wasn't deep enough to place anything in it and the window was too small to be a focal point so it was a bit problematic. My client wanted the space to be a small dressing room so this is how it all worked out:
For the large window on the front, I created the illusion of a closet behind draperies. From the outside of the house, all that can be seen is the pleated drapes so it looks like a normal window covered with curtains, but from the inside, the entire back wall is filled with this charming closet entryway, complete with tasseled pulls giving the illusion that the lady of the house can easily pull back the drapes to enter the closet.
I lined the back of the curtains so the view is as pretty from the outside as it is from the inside.
The dressing room bay alcove is a square opening on the wall to the right of the faux closet. These drapes are a single unit that mount to the wall edge over the opening to the bay alcove. They cover the entire wall and provide a frame around the alcove opening. It makes a nice continuation of the faux closet and gives the room a finished look.
These cascade curtains are for the little window in the bay alcove. The tips on either side are just long enough to extend to just below the window sill. I didn't want to overpower that area by making the drapes big or heavy, so this little arrangement helped define the shape of the alcove while letting in light from the window. I created a bit of an optical illusion with the shape of these curtains.....kind of a telescoping effect to make the room look larger than it is.
Here's a bit of perspective of how it looks with the drapes over the alcove opening and the curtains in the window behind them.
My client sent these pictures to show me how the curtains looked once she had them installed. The first picture is of the front wall where we put the faux closet. You can see how small the room is and how that bay comes almost even with the front wall. It was a challenging room to say the least, but I think it came out charming.
The second picture shows the little alcove with the small window and the drapes covering the front of the bay. I also dressed the little stool for her so her little lady would have a place to sit down while putting on her shoes.
