WINDOW TREATMENTS

When we bought our home in June 2021, I was convinced that all of the changes we needed to make were “cosmetic.” I was thinking paint, lighting fixtures, new hardware, and window treatments. I was only partially correct. We ended up replacing the carpet almost immediately, building an entirely new fence, adding a wall, and wallpapering and remodeling an entire bathroom. I also no longer consider window treatments “cosmetic” because they are darned expensive.

A year and a half into living in the home, we have now replaced or added shades to four rooms for a total of $11,000. We worked with Smith + Noble, which I prefer over the Shade Store (Cheaper! Great service!). Though I’m sure the Shade Store is wonderful, initial quotes were around $15,000-20,000 and I feel like we got the same quality of shade with S+N. Our first window project was to replace very cheap blinds with woven shades in the front family room. We wanted to match the wall color and functionally, needed to block the sun coming in from the front family room and add privacy since this room is the very front of the house.

We worked with Kelley Hoff, a Northern Virginia design consultant provided to us (for free!) by S+N. She came to the house and we decided on the type of shade, fabric, and open/close system that made the most sense and met our budget. To get good looking shades, you do need to spend some money and we were also covering 65 inch long windows. We needed something we could easily pull up and down, depending on the time of day but didn’t want to splurge for the electronic. We went with a luxe cassette shade in Newport/Pebble in the family room, which you can pull up and down by hand and roll into a seamless box at the top of the window. The box sounds ugly but is thin and vertical and covered in the same fabric as the shade, see below.

The color of the shade goes really nicely with our wall color (Benjamin Moore 1033 Hillsborough Harbor) for a fairly seamless look. I was so happy with the end result.

We then needed shades in our three bedrooms. One of our first projects was moving the primary bedroom into the basement family room. This room was in desperate need of shades for privacy from backyard guests and the morning light. For this room, we went with a standard cellular shade in soft white, an ideal, simple bedroom shade. This also opens and closes manually by pushing or pulling on the base of the accordion shade.

The last two bedrooms are our guest bedrooms upstairs. My mom graciously gifted us with these window treatments several months ago after our initial project. In the larger guest bedroom, we were dealing with a slightly funky setup with two very different sized windows, typical for an MCM. The larger window set was really two windows right next to each other and a very large window to cover. We went with one large flat fold woven wood shade in a Bamboo material in Cape/Natural. For the smaller window, we started the top of the shade at the same level of the larger window, to give the room the feeling that both windows are large. This is where my mom stays and she’s already loving the added privacy and ability to keep the room dark in the morning.

For the last bedroom, we had three small windows and decided to keep it simple with the soft white cellular shade we did in the primary bedroom. This really elevated this small room, replacing cheap white blinds that were here originally.

I can’t recommend S+N and Kelley enough! We absolutely love the shades, use them daily, and feel they have totally enhanced the look and feelof the home – inside and out.