Enhance your Decor with Drapery Valance Designs.
Spring is here, and everybody wants to do different things to make a refreshing change from the long, hard winter – much like the rodents seeking light and succor! And there’s nothing like changing small things and repositioning others for a little makeover that could rejuvenate one’s senses! One could well take that bold step and do something out of the ordinary! One of the things I’ve discovered and had me in a thrall, is some pictures I saw recently in Home Decorating – Drapery Valance Ideas for headboards! Now! That’s something I would never have considered a few years ago – it would have been too much of a hassle! But my son is away in college, and I want to do something that’ll surprise him and make him feel special when he comes home on his spring break.
Merriam-Webster defines a headboard as ‘an upright board at the end of the bed where one rests the head’. We are all familiar with the regular headboards that have made for endless design ideas – ornate and inlaid headboards, scrolled headboards, upholstered headboards, short and high headboards, and the minimalist Scandinavian headboards. But drapery headboards? Takes me to the Victorian era of canopied four-poster beds, one of the ways that showed off the wealth of folks! Today, of course, a four poster bed is a matter of choice! We even have nurseries with canopied baby cots for newly born princesses, and I’m not talking about the Beyonce type of princess baby! More and more pedestrian homes feature mystique from a by-gone era and why not? After all, it’s all a matter of personal choice!
As my idea took root, I took a peek down by-gone days, only to realize that headboards have a long history dating back to ancient times when Pharaohs ruled Egypt, and rustic beds of ebony were built with legs carved to imitate those of the animals that were hunted; later, they added headboards to them, carved with animal heads and horns (mostly lion, cheetah, wildebeest), inlaid with gold and silver, to show the distinction between different houses of aristocracy. Some were built with cantilevered platforms supported by high headboards – these styles were hardly functional and mostly to show off class. Ancient Greek furniture was influenced by Egyptian designs, but by about 499BC, Greek designs found its own, and though a lot of it was carved and inlaid, the furniture was crafted for purely functional purposes. They crafted couches or recliners (called ‘klines’) with headboards that could double as backrests, the sort that inspires classic simplicity. Ditto the Roman Empire – though wealthy, the Romans didn’t believe in cluttered spaces, and were known to have a few functional but exquisitely beautiful pieces of furniture, which included couches or beds. The medieval period saw the creation of canopied headboards more out of necessity than opulence. A canopy was suspended from the ceiling beams with ropes and fabric was draped over it as a cover against cold drafts in the then poorly insulated buildings. This paved the way for the construction of the four poster bed, and with or without draped canopy, it became a symbol of wealth in the Tudor era.
Regardless of the style and design of a bed, headboards serve to anchor bedroom decor. Modern styling has broken the mold from the traditional to create themes that are trendy yet functional. Fabric headboard solutions seem restricted to master bedrooms and girls’ bedrooms. The favorite appears to be frilled or ruffled drapery valance designs for headboards – fabric suspended from a drapery rod fixed to the ceiling at a distance quarter the length of the bed from the corner of the ceiling and wall (or on two drapery rods on the ceiling, to create a canopy) and swept back to be secured on four or five knobs fitted to the wall behind the headboard. Very bohemian! Or the pretty and feminine charm of lacy sheers – two broad panels suspended from a drapery rod fixed high on the wall above the headboard or on the ceiling, and caught back from the middle partition with satin ribbon tie-backs, and back-lit with white holiday lights. That got me thinking – why not tab top curtain panels suspended from wooden drapery rods to match the wood of the bed – makes for masculine elegance doesn’t it?
The boy’s bedroom was done up with white-painted walls and oak furniture – a 4 feet by 7 feet bed that has a plain, upright headboard; a stand-alone wardrobe; a study unit. All his bedding had white and blue accents. So I went online and surfed through some drapery websites and decided on a single broad custom drapery panels of navy tab tops secured with oak colored buttons, to be suspended from the ceiling on an oak drapery rod finials, two feet away from the corner where the wall met it. This panel would be swept back to the plain headboard of the oak wood bed to be held in place with basketball hooks fixed on it, to trail down the back of the headboard, right down to the floor. Once this was delivered to me from Zebrablinds, I got the tab top panel hologrammed with a basketball hoop with a basketball whooshing into it – with the Chicago Bulls logo, the boy’s favorite team! And bulls screen printed onto the tabs. I couldn’t believe how good this looked! Simple and masculine it maybe, but the room looks totally designer, what with the lights dancing off the hologram, even in the dark!
Home designed by Mother! And I had the wood blinds taken down from his large picture window and had them replaced with Zebra Sheer Horizontal Shades in a color called the Ivory 525. I love the way these light filtering shades have fabric vanes (which can closed for privacy) nestling between two layers of the softest fabric, and the cordless feature allows him to operate the shades with the push of a button.
New looks for a new season!
