The window treatments you choose to cover up your windows will have a big impact on the overall aesthetic of your home, inside and out, actually. This is true if you live in a magazine spread worthy post and beam home or a simple builder-basic ranch house.
So … what are the right window treatments for a mid-century home? And why are they either: floor to ceiling, pinch pleat curtains or modern up down, insulating shades.
There’s more to it than that, obviously. But let’s talk …
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Mid-Century MODERN Window Treatments
First, let’s define our zone of interest. We are talking about great window treatments for a mid-century MODERN update. Of course, you can take inspiration from anything that was used in the mid-century years. This, for example …
It’s authentically mid-century, of course, mid-century TRADITIONAL. So it is also an example of what not to do.
If you’re trying to achieve a look that’s more mid mod rather than mid-century traditional … I have a couple of alternate recommendations. But first, let’s talk about why mid-century windows need a different kind of window treatment … they are (often) a different type of window.
Walls made of Glass … need the right window treatment
The concept of a glass wall is a defining feature of mid-century modern design. This connection, the indoor outdoor flow, is one of the things we talked about in the previous post on Expanding your home with an Outdoor Room.
A sliding door wall, the sort of Eichler dream of a big, wide, open, expensive glass that takes you directly from the house into an atrium from the house right out into a patio that is your backyard, perhaps with pool, perhaps with landscaping that dissolves that separation between inside and outside.
This particular version of the mid-century ideal comes specifically out of California design, and we don’t as often have it here in the Midwest where I’m based, because it’s not the best idea for a winter, a weather, tight space.
Still, it has such a magic to it that sometimes that wall of glass is worth a few other tradeoffs.
A design concept like this doesn’t exist in vacuum. It requires and allows for a suite of connected details. Post and beam structures support the roof without needing walls. It is a natural step to replace those walls with glass.
A glass wall is great for creating flow between inside and out. It provides wonderful views. But it isn’t as good for privacy or for shade and insulation.
So … a glass “curtain” wall then also allows for (or requires) a connected design idea. It needs the appropriate window treatment.
Two best options for Mid-Century Window Treatments
The two main options for Mid-Century window treatments are:
- Floor-to-ceiling pinch pleat curtains: These offer a classic, elegant look.
- Modern up-down insulating shades: For a cleaner, more contemporary feel.
What doesn’t quite fit the Mid-Century style? Those narrow panels with grommet holes – we can do better!
To lean “pure” mid-century modern, choose Pinch Pleat Curtains …
These are the original solution to the “problem” of the fully glass curtain wall systems. They are meant to allow people to select more privacy, more shade and more insulation at will.
Depending on the desired result, they often involve two layers: a sheer for privacy and a heavier curtain for insulation and light control.
You may be able to use a pinch pleat effect from a modern etsy shop over a standard curtain rod. Although in a classic mcm installation it would be moutned on a track in the ceiling for a completely seamless look or the track would be concealed with a minimalist valence design.
Here’s a fun example pairing pinch pleat curtains concealed behind a wooden valance. Note that this is a great way to combine more high drama curtains with simple double hung windows in a more modest home.
Thomas French worked in the fabric industry in Manchester, England in the early 20th century and the company founded on this technology Rufflette as a bunch of fun ads (check that link) running from the 30’s through the mcm years.
For a contemporary update, try Up-Down Shades
While this type of shade wasn’t common (or available at all) during the mcm years, it pairs well with mid-century vintage windows.
I prefer these in cases where you want more than an all or nothing answer to a need for shade and privacy. You can adjust them to block a specific eyesore element in the view out. And you can block a view in of your face, activity or body while still allowing a nice view of the yard or sky. Plus you can block the sun but not the view, where possible.
The honeycomb and waffle insulation type are a great option for solving the issue of glass that’s less insulated than desired. For best results you can mix and match – use blinds for bonus insulation and drapes or curtains for style!
While not widely used in the Mid-Century era, they embody the Mid-Century spirit of function and simplicity. Here they are helping provide privacy to a street facing kitchen window.
Listen Now On
Quick design tip for…planning an addition.
An addition is the perfect time to incorporate more expansive glass features!
You control window and door opening placement and have the opportunity to include that dream wall of glass.
Resources
- Read more about the history of Thomas French and Sons.
- Mid mod friendly curtain options on Etsy – https://www.etsy.com/market/mcm_pinch_pleat
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Whether you’re lucky enough to have walls of glass inviting you to flow right to the outside spaces of your home, or a more modest Midwestern ranch with a single, double hung window per each bedroom, plus the storms hanging in your garage, or even if your windows were all replaced by a previous owner and everything in the house is builder grade white vinyl, the window treatments you choose to cover up your windows will have a big impact on the overall aesthetic of your home, inside and out, actually.
So today, let’s talk about that. What are the right window treatments for a mid-century home, and why are they either floor to ceiling, pinch pleat curtains or modern up down, insulating shades. More on that in a minute. Right now. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2101.
All right, this week, we’re going to begin with our mid-century house feature of the week and end with a design tip, because it’s going to lead perfectly into the topic of the episode. This week, I want to talk about the concept of a glass wall, a sliding door wall, the sort of Eichler dream of a big, wide, open, expensive glass that takes you directly from the house into an atrium from the house right out into a patio that is your backyard, perhaps with pool, perhaps with landscaping that dissolves that separation between inside and outside.
This connection the indoor outdoor flow, is one of the things we talked about during last week’s episode, and it is a key feature of an ideal mid-century house. This particular version of the mid-century ideal comes specifically out of California design, and we don’t as often have it here in the Midwest where I’m based, because it’s not the best idea for a winter, a weather, tight space. Still, it has such a magic to it that sometimes that wall of glass is worth a few other tradeoffs.
But I want to talk specifically about this glass wall effect, because it’s not a standalone most design ideas aren’t isolated. You can’t just throw them in without reference to other sort of meaningful parts of the building. And this is actually one of the most frustrating parts of fake design materials, putting in a wall of brick that doesn’t actually look like structure, or sort of sticking a fake material onto a surface, or just willy nilly applying design moments from other times in history to a building that they’re not in reference to.
It always seems a little illogical, because design actually has meaning as well as a “look”, and in this case, the suite of decisions that come around a mid-century glass wall house are several. It works best with a post and beam structure, for example. This, this is a different way of thinking about a house, rather than the walls holding up the roof, the columns and beams hold the roof up permanently off the ground and in a Midwestern house or in a conventional stick frame house built anywhere, instead, the roof is supported by an array of smaller units, two by fours, brick blocks, wood CMU block.
This allows us going to a post, and beam structure allows us to open up space between those posts for something completely nonstructural. And as the mid-century, modern designers were playing with this concept of open flow, they used glass. Now, in some ways, glass makes a better wall than a regular wall material wall, in other ways, it does the same functions, and in some ways, it doesn’t do as much.
Let’s talk about the pros a glass wall, a wall of glass, lets in so much daylight, it lets in view. It creates that sense of flow, that indoor, outdoor experience, and it does some of the other regular things we expect out of a wall. It’s a barrier to wind and rain and humidity. It prevents a person or an animal or bugs from passing through the boundary of outside, your personal domain to the inside. And it could be relatively secure. I don’t want to go creepy here, but really, whenever we think about a house as being fully locked down, our houses are not quite as secure as we like to believe that they are.
There’s a lot of ways you can, if you’ve ever done construction demolition, there’s a lot of ways you can get through. Even a wall of a house, certainly break a window, you can get in. But you know, in general, we just we depend on the structure and the security of our houses to keep ourselves in our house, stuff safe, but also on living in a society. We have boundaries, literal as well as metaphorical. And the container of a house doesn’t put all your stuff on display. It doesn’t show everything that’s inside of the container, all the people, all the things to the world and say, here’s all of the things inside the house.
Contemplate whether you want them. Windows. Generally speaking, the more glass you’ve got in a mid-century house, the more likely it is to be facing towards a private part of the yard or guarded by some sort of exterior boundary, a fence, a breeze block, wall plantings. And this is maybe less true for a traditional picture window, which will face the street, but this is where curtains are going to come in. I’ll get to that in a moment. So there’s one way, or there’s several ways, in which a glass. Wall doesn’t act like a wall as much as we expect it to, which is, they don’t present a visual barrier.
They don’t block out the sun when we want shade. They don’t block out the view when we want privacy. They don’t block out the view from the inside to the outside. They also don’t make the best insulation barrier. So they required another connecting design feature. Post and beam structures work well with glass walls, but glass walls also require another design feature, and that is floor to ceiling curtains.
Now, again, this isn’t a brand new idea. There aren’t a lot of brand new design ideas under the sun. But this did require the mid-century modern designers to experiment and come up with some new variations. Humans have been covering their walls with big pieces of fabric for warmth and for privacy since we started assembling big pieces of fabric. Think about tapestries on the walls of a castle.
Think about hanging bed curtains. Think about tents, for that matter. So this isn’t a totally new concept, but we did want to add privacy and add some amount of shading for some thermal regulation and some insulation for thermal regulation to these glass wall buildings. Eichler and the other Mid-century Modern designers didn’t have to go up with something brand new for their residential buildings.
They turned to the modern designs of non-residential buildings that have been happening for decades before. In fact, the type of skyscraper that has an interior structure of columns and floor plates and then a nonstructural exterior wall, mostly made of glass, and the little connections between the glass is called a curtain wall building because it hangs it does not hold up the ceiling.
And in those curtain wall buildings, they were already coming up with ideas for how to cover big, bigger than a house, walls of glass with privacy, with shading devices and with a certain amount of insulation. I’ll get into the history of the pinch pleat curtain in the episode proper, but I just want to talk about this concept of how great it is to have a lot of glass in a wall. I mean, really, we can do a lot better in insulation for a modern, well insulated wall, but in the mid-century era, a glass wall wasn’t that much more poorly insulated than just like a wall.
And they provided such benefits, such tradeoffs, such a boon to the experience of living life in the space, that they can often be worth the trade off, and it may particularly if you can do a good job of insulating, if you can come up with proper balance if you can insulate the rest of the house properly. It might well be worth it to think about maintaining if you’ve got it.
Certainly no one would take I don’t know who would take a California house with a wall of glass and remove the glass, but it might be worth it to think about adding more expanses of glass to your house in a remodel, in a space that you’re modifying. And so for our tip of the week to spoil the end, I’m going to talk about how one excellent way to add in more glass to your house is if you’re ever going to put on any added square footage, any addition.
This is a great place to have total control over what are your window openings, what are your door openings, and maybe add in a little bit more big, wide wall of glass. So the way we always wrap up a mid-century house feature is, you know what? What made this concept Great? Well, it’s almost the defining feature of the mid-century house. It’s so delightful. It’s so warm and welcoming and expansive.
And so then I’ll just leave you with a question, do you have any big expanses of glass in your house that you love? Do you wish for them? Do you feel like you need to move houses to get them? Or do you wonder if it’s possible to get more flow between inside and outside just by making a few modifications to your house?
I will, I will spoil the answer on that. I think that it is possible. So now let’s pivot to our main topic this week, which is window treatments that are great for mid-century homes. This is a question that I actually got asked in an Instagram DM recently as I’ve been doing more of these. I did mid-century I did proper roof types. I did mid-century light fixtures, mid-century furniture. And now people are writing me DMS and saying, Can you send me a link to your episode on fill in the blank.
And sometimes I can do that. Often, I can do that. I’ve talked about so many things over the last six years, but every now and then I hit one like this, where I’m like, Oh no, I cannot send you my episode on mid-century window treatments because I haven’t done one. But I have opinions. I talk about this to my clients all the time. I have notes about this in my mid-century style guide that I share with my master plan clients, and I talk about it inside of ready to remodel. So today I’m going to talk about the right choices for mid-century window treatments to you, this is not super complicated.
I’m going to put links in the show notes. I’m going to show you a bunch of visual examples. I’m going to talk about it, but I. At its base, the concept of what I think is a good idea for your mid-century window treatments is relatively straightforward. You’re either going to be looking for something in the nature of a floor to ceiling pinch pleat curtain in your main areas, and perhaps even a pinch pleat curtain with valences in your in your sort of bedroom private spaces.
Or you’re going to be looking for something a little bit little bit more clean, lined and contemporary, even still, in the mid-century era, and you’re going to go with modern shades, ideally, the kind that come down from the top and come up from the bottom, both so you have maximal control over your view, your privacy and your light. So here’s what’s not going to get the job done.
Although we’ve all been there, I think moving into a house, particularly if you’re moving into your first house, you’re just going to need to get some privacy, some something up over the windows. You may find yourself going to existing curtain rods, or hanging up some curtain rods with those narrow panels you can buy at any home goods store, with big grommet holes in the top that you fold into a zigzag and you jam the curtain rod right through. That is never going to feel particularly mid-century.
So we can, we can reach a little bit farther. There are a lot of variations possible, but I think if we put ourselves into two major categories, and you ask yourself, What are you trying to achieve? Visually, you can come down into you’re looking for floor to ceiling curtains. Are these draperies? I am not an interior designer. This is this is your architect giving you advice here. So forgive me if I’m getting this specific terminology around, but I know what we’re looking at.
You’re looking for something that probably has two layers, that runs on a rail, that either may be mounted over the window or ideally in a truly delightfully modern mid-century house, it’s going to be running in the ceiling, and that’s sometimes an easier place to mount that track, and it probably has two tracks, so that you have two levels that you can create a shear for privacy and then a heavier curtain for better insulation, for more privacy, for light lock, or you’ll tip towards the modern with shades.
And in the Midwest, I think you can never go wrong by going with this sort of Honeycomb waffle insulation shade. It comes in almost to translucent, that lets in so much beautiful light but completely gives you privacy. It can also come in a blackout variety for bedrooms, if you want to completely separate that space when it’s when the curtains are closed, when the shades are drowned, you have the ability to watch a movie during the daytime, or sleep when you’re on night shift, or whatever you need to do.
Those possibilities are there. You can actually also blend these two together if you want maximum insulation, if, for example, you want to preserve the quality, the originality of your wooden windows, your single, paned windows. I’ve talked in the past, and what was that episode? Let me look it up. Episode 1708, should I replace my mid-century windows, in which I largely argue that you should not if you are lucky enough to have the original wood constructed windows that were installed in your house at the time that your house was built, and they are in any kind of decent shape whatsoever.
They’ve been maintained somewhat properly. I highly encourage you to preserve them. People often feel that they’re required, that it’s even good sense to tear out their original windows because they are single, paned, because they might have air leaks in them, because they’re performing inadequately, and replace them with new modern Windows.
And I would say, to make that worthwhile, you really need to go to an extremely high grade, to an architectural grade of new windows to get the gracefulness of appearance, to get the proper operability, to get something that’s going to have quality to last, if you tear out original mid-century windows and you replace them with vinyl, builder grade quality modern Windows, what you’re actually doing is probably starting a new maintenance cycle, a slow one of tear out, toss and replace every 20 to 30 years.
It’s, it’s a frustrating thing to see happen. When these reinstalls happen, they open up the risk for damaging your siding around them, for letting in water. They just don’t. They’re not, they’re not great. If you want to know, why go listen to that episode 1708, but if you’re thinking, okay, Della, I don’t even feel like I need to go do that. I’m telling you; my window is single paned. It’s not very warm, okay, so this is where you might want to double up on your window treatments.
And it may very well end up being worthwhile to put proper insulating up down blinds right against your window and then go over them with an insulating curtain, and that could cost less, look better and hold up for decades longer than any kind of basic grade replacement windows. For more on the sort of pitch of why you should absolutely try to stick with. Original windows, if you at all can. There is a wonderful there’s a website and a wonderful accompanying Instagram account, the Craftsman blog, which is a non mid-century specialist, but a vintage window specialist who just constantly preaches the gospel of keep your original windows, maintain your original windows, take care of your original windows.
Yes, sure. Replace broken panes, seal up air leaks. There’s so many things you can do, but you don’t necessarily need to go after your original mid-century Windows. You can just take good care of them. You could, for example, hang the storm windows back up if you have them, or can commission modern storm windows to be made for them.
All right, that’s all the proselytizing I’m going to do about keep your original windows, but the type of window that you have, whether it is original or a replacement, the style, the proportions of it, do also affect how you’re going to think about curtaining it. And just as if you are forced, if your windows have already been replaced, and you’re replacing again, if you’re putting new space onto your home, you’re adding on and you’re responsible for creating a new window pattern.
Just as the shape, the proportion of the windows that you choose will affect the aspect ratio, the visual language of your exterior of your house, you can work with or work against in a positive way. You can improve upon the proportions the shapes of your windows on the inside, with extending the curtains beyond them in certain places, with giving yourself playful valences, with going all the way up to the ceiling, with going all the way down to the floor, with extending beyond the edges of the windows in certain spaces, you can break up an asymmetrical wall or add asymmetry where there was none.
There are so many possibilities that you can modify a window with the window treatments. Just go ahead and say probably, unless your style is pure 19, late 40s, mid-century vintage twee, you’re probably not going to look for Cafe curtains or the kind of curtains that just come down to the, you know, from just the sort of standard. If you look up a blog for how to hang curtains in your apartment, it’s going to tell you hang them eight inches above the top of the window, mount the curtain rod high, and run the curtains 15 inches below the window to make the windows feel larger.
That’s always going to feel a little silly in a mid-century house. It’s a bit more of a cottage style, although I’m going to show you an example in the show notes page of the most astonishingly loud plaid curtains, which have three tiers. There’s a valence, little shorty curtain across the top, and then there’s an upper curtain in a bedroom window that’s pulled open and they in the vintage ad.
And then there’s a lower curtain that’s closed for privacy, and it’s all very functional, and it just, it’s so busy, and then they match the plaid to the skirt around the twin bed. And honestly, it’s so over the top. I kind of love it, although, personally, I would never and it’s not what I recommend. So those things exist, but I think you’re, going to be looking in your mid-century house.
If you’re going for a mid-century modern aesthetic, you’re going to be looking for something a little bit more minimal.
You might do a bold pattern on the curtain itself, but you’re looking for something that’s going to simplify the details in the room, not add busyness. That said, maybe your taste is adorable. Late 1940s tweet, in which case, knock yourself out with the cafe curtains in bold mod colors.
Or, as one of my clients currently in the hopper loves with little lemon print on it for the kitchen window, this is a place where you’re going to lean into your own mid-century style first, and this will actually direct you. Are you more? Are you leaning towards pinch pleat or are you leaning towards shades might come down to where you fall on the mid-century style spectrum. If you’ve never taken it yet, please take a moment now, while you’re listening to pop over to my website and go to mid mod dash midwest.com/quiz
and take my mid-century style quiz. It’ll give you one of three results. Are you more mid-century vintage on one end, more modern mid-century on the other, or somewhere in the middle with a with a mid-century fusion taste, it’s gonna lean you in so many decisions in your house towards something that’s a bit more contemporary, but with mid-century materials, mid-century flavor, or something that feels like you’re creating a time capsule from a particular moment in history, or somewhere in between.
So let’s, let’s do a tiny little history dive. I did some googling before this episode, and learned something I didn’t know, which is that the concept of pinch pleat, the sort of curtain that is connected to a little tape and slides back and forth on a rail, is much older than the mid-century period, and perhaps older than the modernist period, or as old as the modernist period.
It’s the concept of curtain tape is attributed by several sources that I could find on the internet to a guy named Thomas French, a Brit born in Manchester, and he worked in the flourishing textile industry and. Ended up coming up with a design to connect little metal fasteners to fabric tape, which could then be connected to any number of curtain textiles and used to create curtain the company that was founded based on this idea was called Rufflette. The Rufflette tape is on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and it’s attributed as a 1922 to 1950 product, a strip of cream colored cotton Rufflette tape onto which are fixed 11 glass brass curtain hooks.
The tape is printed at intervals with Rufflette brand, and the hooks are in the Maid of the shape of a crook or a shepherd’s staff with an enclosed loop at the end, so they could be hooked onto a curtain rod or rail and then taken down again, so you could regularly wash your curtains, something I don’t think I’ve ever done in my entire life, anyway, but this Rufflette brand the if you want to go looking I’ll put a couple of their vintage ads into the show notes page, but they were advertising what looked to me like quite modernist curtains in the 1930s and they get into the technique of how you hook on to the rail and how the curtain rail works.
And then in the 1950s there are ads for the double track so you can have your privacy and your decor curtain fabric separately. And he went on to invent, where the company went on to invent all sorts of different mechanisms for opening and closing the curtains, with, with weighted pieces. They had also venetian blind elements. And during World War One, they actually worked to create machine gun parts using the same concept of a fabric ribbon attached to repeated metal bits.
Anyway, box pleat, pinch pleat, deep pleat tapes. They all came out of this. This original concept of like let’s have a sturdy piece of fabric, cotton ribbon that can connect to a rail and then can be can have different curtain fabrics affixed to it. This gives us so much so I’m going to go ahead and put a couple of visual examples into the show notes page, but just imagine, if you will, the classic vintage ad of the era.
You don’t really see a window with curtains sort of over the window. You see a wall of curtain. It’s a lot of fabric. It’s not cheap. It’s a bit of a flex, but it really creates this sense of it’s both busy, it’s got a little bit of visual pattern to it, and it also is simple. It goes it serves the purpose of wall. It kind of works in tandem with whatever’s happening on the other side of that, whatever shape of window you’ve got, and when the curtain is drawn, it conceals the edges. It goes right across the post and beam.
If the window is smaller than you’d like it to be, it hides that. And if the window is full glass, it gives you all the privacy that you’re looking for in an ideal world. Again, this is mounted double, so you’ve got one rail, perhaps running along the ceiling or perhaps running along the top of the wall that supports the inner the lighter, sheer curtain that gives you your privacy, your daytime light, and then your heavier curtain that gives you insulation, that gives you night privacy, that makes you feel totally buttoned in and protected.
When is it appropriate to have a curtain that doesn’t go all the way to the floor. Now, it’s absolutely true in bedrooms, it’s kind of inconvenient if you’ve got curtains that are going from floor to ceiling, although if you look at some of the sort of higher end, mid-century advertising, you’ll often see floor to ceiling curtains in bedrooms with the headboard pulled out a little bit from the wall.
And this is for people who struggle with where on earth in their bedroom to put a bed, because mid-century bedrooms can be a little bit hard to finish, particularly with modern furnishings. There’s often doors on doors or windows on every single wall in kind of inconvenient places, and it can be weird to sort of have the bed set off to one side with a window over part of it and not over the other one solution is just to go big with your curtains, go floor to ceiling, go wall to wall, and conceal the nature of where the window starts and stops, particularly at night, when it’s all closed up.
Alternately, if you have a type of bedroom layout, which we just talked about in our we just came up in our mid mod madness for this year, a bedroom mid-century ribbon window that is a wide window that’s at Mount of the same height. It’s the same height down from the ceiling as all the other windows in your house, but it’s shorter, so it comes as a long, narrow space that basically gives an adult a view out from sort of shoulder height above.
It’s great for privacy in and of itself. It doesn’t need, necessarily, for you to pull the curtains in order to change your clothes, certainly to change anything on your lower half. You can look right out the window and see people going by on the street and know that they can’t see in and see your body area.
So it’s nice, particularly when you’re sitting down, when you’re laying in bed, all you can see in the sky, no one can see into you. It’s very nice for that purpose, you might leave the curtains open. More. But how do you curtain that space? If you’re going to do a drapery style approach, you can simply have a short, wide curtain in the same pinch pleat style that only comes down to the bottom of that of that window trim, and then you’ve got room to furnish underneath it and do what you need to do.
And this is you’ll see this in vintage imagery of mid-century bedrooms all over the place. I’ll put one image in the show notes page that’s actually a motel bedroom, which may be the interaction we’ve had with this more often. If, if you ever road tripped as a kid and stayed in a sort of a blast from the past vintage motel, you may have experienced this kind of privacy curtain.
This leads me to though this particular image that I found has a wooden valence, and it reminds me of a fantastic mid-century house that I did a master plan for two or three summers ago. The house had been originally commissioned for a doctor’s family, so it had a lot of fancy high end features in its original build, and we were doing some remodeling of reconfiguring, expanding the owner suite bedroom and putting in some better living spaces into the basement.
The main living area needed nothing. It had gorgeous big floor to ceiling windows looking out, or large windows not quite floor to ceiling, floor, two upper high on the wall, windows looking out of the backyard, beautiful private backyard, and it had a very interesting detail of a deep wooden valence that concealed the top mechanical edge of the curtain, the double curtain rod, and also concealed fluorescent light tubes.
Now fluorescent lights are horrible. Highly dis recommend them, but they were a narrow, shallow, bright light that was available in the meds and tree era. They weren’t incandescent bulbs. They weren’t individual little point sources of light. They were long strips of light. Today we would absolutely replace those fluorescent tube lights with LED strip light, but the idea was great because it allowed them to have a bunch of things going on at once in a beautiful horizontal line that had lovely wood grain.
It sort of wrapped around the room, extended the horizontal feeling of a step down den, and concealed the curtain mechanism. And when the curtains were closed, you could shine a light down on the curtains and highlight their pretty fabric all at once with one simple thing. I have since borrowed that concept of the wooden valence, that sort of top concealing edge, the mechanical concealing strip of wood. If you do it in a simple in a one by or less thickness, you can get a lot of stretch.
You might want to think of something being eight inches, 10 inches, or even 12 inches high, to really almost come up and meet the ceiling, or to not intentionally not quite meet the ceiling, and give another sort of extend the mid-century horizontal make the room feel wider and deeper than it needs, than it might actually be, proportionally by giving yourself a nice horizontal line to follow around.
And again, do not use that wooden balance to conceal fluorescent tube lights, but do absolutely think about using it as a way to build in extra light features in the room, as well as to hide curtain mechanisms in that particular house, we were rearranging windows in the bedroom space, and we recreated that detail in the bedrooms. I think it was, it existed in some of the untouched front bedrooms and had been removed from the back bedrooms, and we put it back in the whole house because it just turned out into a beautiful sign.
I’ll throw the sketches from that project into the show notes page as well, so you can see exactly how that could work for you. Now, this has an added benefit, if your house was originally designed with curtain track built into the ceiling, for example, and it’s still in good shape, but the curtains made replacing or you have access to the original mechanisms for pinch plate curtains, you are in luck. But if you have a house that maybe doesn’t have as dramatic windows, but you’d like to, you’d like to add a little more drama to your house and extend the interior feeling of your regular sized windows by giving them bigger floor to ceiling, or nearly floor to ceiling, pinch pleat curtain effects. You’re going to have to come up with the mechanism to make that work.
Pinch pleat curtains are not inexpensive, but if you turn to Etsy, you’re going to find a lot of opportunities to get a nicely mounted and nicely set up pinch pleat effect that still is intended to run on a modern, easily accessible curtain rail again every time, or a curtain rod. I don’t love the look of staring straight at the curtain rod.
That’s it’s a more contemporary effect. It’s never going to read as original mid-century, as effectively. But you could absolutely conceal that curtain rod behind a solid, beautiful wooden valence and simplify your hunt and your mechanism and the way that all of this goes together. It could be easier for you to put up and take down your pinch plate curtains. You could have them made out of more fabric, and you could create a DIY installation much more simply, rather than going to setting up and having installed all over your house an official rail system.
So there are always budget compromises, and there are often ways to make it feel just as intentional and beautiful with a little bit more clever design thinking. Of course, the sort of the gold standard in mid-century modern is minimalism. And so that is the ceiling, the ceiling track that just disappears and works effectively. But if you’re more in a curtain rod situation, if you found a great deal on a bunch of narrow panel drapes that you can connect together that are all meant to hang from a curtain rod, and you want to then give it a more polished look. That’s a great compromise.
Go check out the wooden valence effect to cover up the way the operability of your of your curtains. Okay, so we just spent a lot of time talking about, what if you want to do vintage, if you want to do high modern, classic mid-century, the floor to ceiling drapery version. What about the other? What if you’re looking for a more contemporary, a slightly cleaner, a little bit more easy to operate, a more minimalist version.
What if you don’t want to watch what if you don’t want to wash curtains ever, then you’re probably going to look for an up, down blind. Now, this is not necessarily a technique that was used a lot in the mid-century era. This the current very available, relatively affordable waffle, insulated blind wasn’t in general, general manufacture in the mid-century era.
But I feel like this is one of our what would the mid-century moderns have done? Get Out of Jail, free cards? I think they would have loved this tech. I think they would have loved this look. I think it would have felt fun and functional and simple to them, and they would totally have gone along with it, if they had it. To prove that point, when they had the opportunity, they did horrifying compromise things, which is to use metal mini blinds in certain residential applications.
If you have this in your house. Hi, I did when I moved in too. I highly recommend that you remove it ASAP, because it’s just awful. They’re dusty, they’re clunky, they’re cold, they look industrial. It makes your house look like a dentist’s office. In my personal home,
the bathroom window had metal mini blinds in it, and that was for a very good reason, because the bathroom window of my house faces the kitchen window of my neighbor’s house less than 12 feet away, which is not ideal. You sit down on the toilet and you could, if you wanted, literally make eye contact with someone washing dishes at my neighbor’s sink.
It’s not great, and I understand why the previous owner had had wanted to have a metal mini blind in place there, because he was able to sort of let a breeze in and also have the privacy that he needed. But that didn’t work for me. So the very first thing I did was actually a third alternative to any type of window curtain which doesn’t solve an insulation problem, but does solve a privacy problem, which was to put up a privacy film on that window.
Now I could have replaced the window with reeded glass or with glass block, which would have been a mid-century solution to the problem and would be a little bit more of a high end solution, but I want to just give a shout out to a very simple product that I think is still available at Home Depot for perhaps $20 a pop. They sell a number of soap and water cling film finishes, most of which are incredibly tacky and one of which is actually quite nice, the rice paper version, which you can just adhere to your window with moisture and peel right off again with no damage.
And it provides perfect privacy for my bathroom window, which I now it’s a double hung I only open it from the top when I need a vent in the summer, when I want a breeze blowing through the house. I never open the bottom, because, again, if I were to remove that rice paper faux privacy or faux rice paper privacy screen, I could be making eye contact with my neighbors at their kitchen sink, but it gives me all the privacy that I need, and in that room, I just don’t feel the need for added insulation. It’s a small space heated by a single register. It warms up just fine.
So that’s your sort of third option your Get Out of Jail Free card, is make the glass of the windows itself private, which you can do with an aftermarket effect, or what the mid-century moderns did in certain places was to use reeded glass, to use textured or printed glass, to use glass with a with a fluted interior pattern that obscures what’s going on behind it. So you get the light, some of the color, but none of the view. You get all the privacy of having no way to look through that particular piece of glass.
But I was going to talk about insulated curtains, the up down blinds, which I used in the rest of my house, and I think are a great contemporary update to a mid-century home. There are a number of different manufacturers that provide these. And I’m a little agnostic as to I don’t have, I don’t have a favorite print. And but you’re looking for one that has a relatively simple operating mechanism. I do strongly recommend not that you get the kind that goes up and down at the touch of a finger, because those tend to jam and they don’t work particularly well, I would say.
Use cords if you’re not afraid of them, if you don’t feel like they’re a child or a pet choking hazard or get the kind where you have a little button to press with your thumb to release the tension on the interior cord structure so that they go up and down easily. I find that to be by far the best system. But when you’ve got them fully closed, they give you great at an insulation and air seal to a cool glass window surface or a hot one, because they likely have a great ability to keep heat out of the house in the summer.
Anytime I’ve got summer sun coming in through a window, I’ve got one of these curtains drawn, one of these shades drawn, so that you are it’s only coming in as far as the interior of the glass and then bouncing back out again. It does a great job of keeping the house cooler, and they’re perfect for light control and for privacy. The key to this is not to have the kind of shade that you can only pull down, the classic, the sort of roller shade hinkiness.
We don’t need that we don’t need the ability only to pull things down from the ceiling, and you know, have to crack them at the bottom if you want to have a little bit of air movement. We want something that you can control how much of the vertical space of your window you are closing up. And it can be a very nice again, talking about changing the proportions of the room from the inside, or even from the outside, you can help a run of exterior windows feel more horizontal.
If your habit in the daytime is to have sort of only the middle third of the window area vertically blocked by blind. Then you’ve got room to see out at the bottom, yourself, to let a little breeze, to let your pets peek out if they want to. And you’ve got room above to look at the sky, to see the trees moving outside. It’s really pleasant and nice from a style guide perspective, you’re going to go extremely minimal.
You want to match the curtain material, that shade material. Sorry, I keep mixing up curtains and shades, and I know they’re not the same thing. You want to match that shade material to the color of the wall that you’ll be going with as much as possible. If your window trim is already painted, that should be the same.
It should basically, when they’re closed, it should read as largely the same material. I will say, even if you’re not concerned about privacy, it’s a wonderful effect be able to close up the house for the night by pulling curtains or shades. In the daytime, windows are our view out into the world. They’re wonderfully lit in daylight. They make us feel expansive. They are not at all on private particularly, people aren’t likely to see into your house very far during the daytime.
Once we have more light inside the house than out, however, Windows start to feel harsh and reflective and hard. They’re unpleasant to be around when it’s dark outside the house and light inside the house. So this is a great opportunity to think about what is how can you soften a room? How can you bring down the noise quality of the room? You can make a room feel quieter and more closer to bedtime by extending more soft furnishings around it.
And you can actually also use both up down blinds have enough soy noise absorption to help you out with this, and certainly go big on floor to ceiling curtains, if you’re worried about noise in your house, if you’re trying to get the whole house to feel quieter, if it feels echoey, if it feels like conversations travel from one of the house to the other, too much, you definitely want to be able to modify that with soft furnishings, with rugs, but also curtains can really help you out.
Let’s see. Um, I was going to talk about reading glass and cheap fixes at the end, but I just ended up spontaneously popping that into the middle. So I will throw a bunch of imagery into the blog post for this. Go check it out mid mod. Dash, midwest.com/ 2101 to see examples and weigh in.
Tell me what you think about curtains, about shades, about visual privacy in mid-century houses. This is, I think it’s a personal question. A lot of people have different feelings about this, but I’m curious to hear about yours, soap. Send me a DM, let me know what you think. Does your house need better window treatments? Does it need more vintage window treatments? The choices that you can make can really help tip the house towards the right angle.
And one thing that I often see is when houses turn over from a single owner, from someone who lived in the house in the mid-century era, but through the 80s, through the 90s, through the 2000s often they will have added fancier quote, unquote window treatments to the windows. Over the years, they’ll have gone in the 80s and put in something with really elaborate over the top window valences.
Or they’ll put in fabrics or materials that just don’t feel. Particularly mid-century. So one of the things you can do as you bring the house back into the insecure era, as you make it your own, is bring back some of those more mid-century appropriate window treatments and really get those back into line with the era of the house. Or if you’re looking to get a more of a mod mid-century look, bring it a little bit cleaner, a little bit forward into the now era. Blinds might be the option that help you do exactly that.
To wrap up, we’ll finish with our mid ma design tip of the week, and I want to talk about planning for an addition. Here’s the great news, your mid-century home was built to be easily added onto. But that doesn’t mean bigger is always better.
So step one is to decide what you really need to add on. Then you want to know your limits, your zoning, your whatnot. You want to keep it simple to plan the perfect addition for your home. But you also want to make the most of this opportunity, because planning an addition is a lot of time, money and energy to create. So you want to make sure that that effort, that trouble, that expense, gives you as many benefits as possible.
I like to think of this as feeding two birds with one scone, a little bit nicer than killing them. But basically, you want to think about what all can you get out of an addition, yes, a little bit of added square footage, you may also be able to prove your exterior appearance. Create more privacy in your yard, as we were talking about last week, it’s wonderful to have an outdoor room that exists in an interior corner of your house, so there’s an L shape of space, and pushing out an addition into the backyard may give the opportunity to change the overall footprint of your house from a simple rectangle into an L, or from an L into a C or an S or a z in floor plan, in overview.
So what are you going to win, not just from the added interior space, but also around the perimeter, the edges of the house? By creating these new shapes, you might be able to create a better patio, a deck, a covered porch, by enclosing part of your backyard with an L shaped addition. You might also improve your home’s passive solar potential. You might cut off your least favorite view. You might use a small addition to the footprint to scoot around interior spaces and make them work better than what you already had, even though you’re only adding a little bit of square footage.
So the bottom line of planning a great addition is that you want to make a scone that you can feed to more than one bird. And one more thing I want to make sure to add, in reference to today’s episode is, when you’re planning an addition, you have your best possible opportunity to go big drama with your windows. It’s often a challenge to cut newer or bigger windows into existing spaces in your house based on what’s going on with the exterior siding, what’s happening on the inside.
Adding new larger windows where there are existing windows can be a big expense, although it’s often possible to take a window of a certain height and make it lower the bottom sill, make it taller vertically, but it’s harder to add wider windows. You have to think about structure and heading, but when you’re planning an addition, you can bake some of those choices in. You might be able to get the floor to ceiling, window, wall, the big slider surrounded by fixed glass that you’ve dreamt of, if you have your eyes set on a sort of a California Eichler style for your Midwestern home, and you might choose to set that up with proper passive solar, so you’re letting the sun in to take advantage of it to hit a concrete surface that it’s going to gain heat.
You’re going to plant it with shade overhang so that it doesn’t overheat in the summer. You’re going to add the right window treatments to keep the sun out when you don’t want it, and let it in when you do, and have proper privacy. And all of these good things can be baked into the concept of your edition if you’re looking at it the right way.
So if you’re excited about the idea of planning an addition really the right way, if you’ve got this part dialed in and you want us more pre edition consultation checklist items. Be sure to grab my free resource, the addition planning checklist at mid mod midwest.com/edition there’s also one of our wonderful design clinics focus on the topic of planning for additions.
But I will just say, if you’re thinking about adding on square footage to a mid-century home, I highly recommend you do that via a larger Master Plan approach, because of that very aspect of the incredible potential to change, not just add an extra 100 or 200 square feet to your house, but to change the way even the parts of the house that you’re not working on flow to create new outdoor space, to create the look, the privacy so many tied in benefits of your home come down to just pushing out into the backyard a little bit, not that you need to make reference to your neighbors, but pushing out a little bit of an addition into the backyard may change the privacy aspect, the division between your yard and the next yard.
I personally really benefit, as I said last week, from the divided L shape of the back of my garage, a straight wall and my neighbor’s probably 1990s addition pushing back a little great room from the back of their house, and it creates an L between our side yards that both gives us both more privacy in our yards and makes a wonderful outdoor room for me. So thanks for that delightful elderly neighbors who no longer live there.
One way or another, every choice you make for your home has the potential to feed more than one bird with that scone. So that is always the benefit of Master Plan thinking, and I hope that that concept is pretty much what you take away from every episode of the mid modern model podcast.
All right, that’s about all for this week if you want to follow up, if you’re looking for visual references for fun, pinch pleat curtains, if you want to see some of those ads for the Rufflette original curtain design. If you want to see what I mean by up down, curtains with uh, with a waffle pattern, pop over to the show notes page that is at midmod-midwest.com/ 2101 to see links, transcripts and everything I’ve referenced inside of this episode. Catch you next week mid mod remodeler.