Beckert Dining Room Before
In this dining room, the clients had hired someone else to do the blinds, stationary panels and board mounted Empire valance, and didn’t continue working with her because they were disappointed by how “ordinary” the window treatment looked once it was installed. I can see why my predecessor went with a board mounted treatment; the window was in a weird little recessed niche, so there wasn’t room to do a swag valance on a pole set with finials (which is what the client mistakenly thought that she was ordering). What’s more, there were little can lights inside the niche, so you couldn’t mount the treatment on the wall outside and above the niche or there would be light shining through from the back side of the valance. Mounting the valance inside the niche, as the other designer chose to do, required dropping it down well below those can lights, which looked kind of weird and underwhelming.
Beckert Dining Room After
The clients brought me in to design window treatments for their living room and kitchen treatments, specifically requesting decorative hardware and more drama for these rooms. I suggested adding some decorative hardware to jazz up the board mounted treatment in the dining room as a low-cost alternative to expensive rework or scrapping it altogether. The clients were having trouble visualizing how these finials were going to look sticking up at the top of the swag valance, so I did a quick mock up in my design software and assured them that it was going to look like “I meant to do that.” I ordered the finials with wood screws and my installer was able to add them to the dining room valance on-site without even taking it down on the same day that he installed my treatments in the other rooms. The size of those finials was perfect – it looks like the valance was installed at that height deliberately to accommodate the height of the finials, and it seems as though the can lights were installed specifically to illuminate the decorative hardware. The clients got a more formal and unique design for just a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of hardware – and I like the way it turned out so much that I plan to use finials that way “on purpose” for future projects!
Contributed by Rebecca Deming Rumpf of Custom Interiors By Rebecca.
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