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When she was a child, the interior designer Octavia Dickinson would climb in the four -position bed of her parents and drew the curtains. There, coconut of muslin layers, she learned how the drapery can transform the atmosphere of a space: diffusing the light and softening corners and evoking “an indulgent and all enveloping sensation”.
Curtains were a must of interior Since the 1500s. Now, however, they have had a moment under the spotlight as designers Look beyond the dressing to deploy the drapery of fabrics for a theatrical and practical effect on the cabinets and around the corners of books, under the counters and the doors. Their references are wide: tent boudoirs, Victorian room separators, craftsmen and crafts doorsAnd the steering wheel under the workforce of an Edwardian scullerie are some of the influences that shape the rebirth of today's curtain.
For the designer based in London, Tiffany Duggan, this is the Vista. She compares the curtain to a architectural device; A draped door is like a “beautiful arch” trying your gaze from one room to another, explains Duggan, who started his career as a picturesque painter to play the New End Theater and Trafalgar Studios in London. “The fabric adds a feeling of intrigue – and mystery,” she says.
The Spanish designer Marta de la Rica agrees: “He evokes a mood.” For her own house in Biarritz, she turned to the famous “tent room” at the Palais de Charlottenhof of the 19th century, Potsdam. In a upper floor bedroom, the checkered curtains float on the cupboards and a pair of fanciful tents hides more storage, the cocooning atmosphere “a sheet with a vaulted and radiated ceiling.
The return of the curtain reflects the transition to touching and textured interiors. But maybe there is more. In fractive times, a retreat bordered by fabric added a call. It is the adult equivalent of a childhood den. The Tori Murphy Tri fabric designer remembers House in Ireland. “Curtains were an authentic solution to daily life, used to keep heat from fires,” she said. But they also brought a feeling of “wrap”, transforming ordinary rooms into “something theatrical – and exciting”.
But there is an argument for restraint. Designer Benedict Foley is not a fan of the approach of “curtains everywhere”, especially at the splash distance of the pans. (The tent chat retreat with a message to scratch, which I spotted online, is also questionable.)
The interior designer Tom Morris offers another perspective: “Curtains are a structurally uncommon way to do something different.” In a Victorian terrace in London, he hung curtains in daring and contrasting colors to separate the room from the dressing room and the bathroom. They can be open to proportions to the exposure of the 19th century or closed for privacy. “It was a question of provoking a sense of theaters who did not interfere on architecture,” he says.
This versatility extends over the materials. Morris recommends the oil vest “Bog-Standard”. Duggan draped a chalet door in a embroidered Suzani. The Harlequinesque Dickinson room separator is made using ordinary fabric strips. And on the landing space of a cottage in northern London, Foley engaged in theatrical trends with a “icy cotton deceived in folds that look like” to look like “a canopy of Baldachin in Venetian marble”, but also to invoke a feeling of “Marlene Dietrich arriving on stage”.
Textile designer Lucy Bathurst is also ingenious. Its custom cut panels, embellished with patterns applied to sheets or sails that turn on the ground, blur the line between “useful” padding and textile art. In her London studio, she encourages customers to cross a “sweet” of remains – Milliner velvet, pieces of silk, lace and tweed.
There are not two identical conceptions. One presented the client's star panels dispersed among modernist forms; A reference to the art of Ben Nicholson, whose work Bathurst has learned to love through his father-art. Otherwise, to disguise a laundry room, a black wool panel used in the rooms was dotted with shards of translucent tissues to disperse light as stained glass.
In the Historical Interior Decoration Society Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, the deceased co-founder John Fowler would study historical costumes for ideas, smuggling details, such as silk slash in a doublet or a rucked shepherd skirt, in a padding. This tradition of imaginative loans continues. General director Emma Burns transformed ancient crew work into a door For a new wooden construction in the Rural Wisconsin, inspired by a full -embroidered hanging at the Kelmscott Manor by William Morris.
For burns, curtains provide solutions to clumsy spaces. She quotes a compact room in London which she wrapped in a drapery with yellowed striped to hide the storage. Golden paintings hang on the chains in the blink of an eye to the splendor of the Napoleon country tent, which triggered the craze for the rooms wrapped in fabric.
In the apartment in a room in London, Benedict Foley shares with his colleague Daniel Slowik, the linen curtain divides the room of the bedroom. Pulled back, the custom folds frame the space like a pair of “fluted columns”. When closed, they offer “welcome comfort, like being in an enriched bed bed,” he said. It is the drapery to its most judicious: practical, elegant – and beautiful.
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