Consider Cornices for Your Windows

Sunshine Drapery sliding glass doors window treatment

Cornices. Interior designers talk about them, you see them on the TV, and they're even in the home decorating magazines! People, just like you, turn to cornices when they are seeking a unique way to transform a plain space and its windows into something sublime. If you don't know what cornices are and how they can help you, that's ok! You've come to the right place!Take a moment to discover what a cornice is, how they can benefit your windows and how interior decorators have used them to meet design challenges. Cornicesare wood valances usually made from plywood that’s mounted to the wall above a window. They areassembled with wood screws and corner brackets before it’s covered with the design of your choice. For some rooms, simply painting your cornice is appropriate while covering it with wallpaper or fabric is required for a more sophisticated look. You can team your cornice with another treatment or it can stand alone. Since a cornice is generally made from wood it is typically paired with a soft treatment like a fabric shade or curtain to balance its hard lines.

Bland Room

Interior designers often turn to cornices when it comes to decorating rooms that lack interesting architecture. If your room doesn’t have any crown moldings or you want to hide a window’s modest trim, a cornice enhances such a room and its windows. Cornices hide a window’s hardware, making the window and your room more eye appealing. A cornice window treatment is ideal for blending into the rest of the room. You can blend the color of your curtains with the colors in the room. Installing a cornice is another way to let your window design work in tandem with your furniture’s design. A cornice window treatment completes the room, bringing all the design elements together. The right cornice can make a small room feel larger, drawing the eye upward, changing the feel of the room entirely.

Open Spaced Room

For some homeowners a great room with its open space and floor to ceiling windows is what most attracted them to their homes. But once they moved in they were faced with accommodating their traditional design tastes in the room. Sunshine designers to the rescue. Covering cornice boards in damask patterned fabric and attaching caramel-colored silk drapery panels that mimicked European pillars, Sunshine designers were able to frame the picturesque outside view. By using individual cornice boards between each window rather than one cornice that extended across them all, Sunshine designers were able to add architectural elements to a challenging set of windows.

Make it Chic

How do you give a dining room a chic yet classic look? With a window cornice, board and panels of course. When a client asked for window treatments in her dining room that reflected her Greek heritage, Sunshine Drapery designers got to work, meeting the challenge with Greek key banding on panels as well as the cornice board. Accented black and white decorative ribbon gave the dining room a tailored, classic look. When faced with a stark master bedroom, Sunshine Drapery designers created a tailored traditional room by adding a sheer fabric swag to a fabric covered cornice board. To soften the cornice further, designers hung sheer panels to frame the windows sides. Elegant and refined, this cornice and panels werethe perfect solution to what was once a mundane master bedroom.