Custom Drapery in Portland, Maine

Four things, roughly in order: how much fabric the window takes, which fabric you choose, the lining, and the hardware.

Fabric quantity is driven by fullness and by the size of the window, which is why a wide slider costs more than two double-hungs of the same total width. Fabric itself ranges enormously, and a large repeat in the pattern adds yardage because the pattern has to match across panels. Blackout lining and interlining each add a layer. Hardware ranges from a simple rod to a motorized track.

We quote after measuring your actual windows, and every quote is line-itemed so you can see what each window costs and where the money is going. The consultation and the measure are free.

Usually four to eight weeks from the day you approve the order, depending on the fabric and the workroom.

The clock starts with fabric: designer fabrics are cut to order and some are on back order, which is worth knowing before you fall in love with one. Fabrication follows, then we install, almost always in a single visit, including dressing the folds so the panels hang correctly from day one.

If you are working to a date — a holiday, a party, a closing — tell us at the consultation. It changes which fabrics we show you.

The fabric itself blocks essentially all the light. What you see at the edges is a different question, and it is the one that decides whether a bedroom is genuinely dark.

Light comes around drapery, not through it: down the sides, over the top and along the floor. So a dark room is a design problem, not a fabric problem. Wide panels that overlap in the middle, a rod extended well past the glass, a proper return closing the gap at the wall, and length that reaches the floor all matter more than the lining specification.

If you need a genuinely black room — a nursery, a night-shift bedroom, a media room — the honest answer is often drapery over a room-darkening shade, or a shade with side channels behind the drapery. We will tell you which one your room needs.

Yes, and it is one of the best applications for motorization there is. A wide, heavy, lined panel is genuinely hard to move by hand, and a motorized track moves it silently on a schedule or from your phone.

We install Lutron drapery systems, including the Palladiom™ track, as an authorized Lutron dealer, along with motorized traverse rods and ripplefold tracks. They run from an app, a wall keypad, a remote or a voice assistant, and they follow sunrise and sunset through a Maine year. See Lutron shades and drapery systems for how the control side works.

Two things to decide early: ripplefold is the heading that suits a motorized track best, and it is far cheaper to specify the motor now than to retrofit one later.

Yes, and it is one of the most common things we do. Side panels over an existing shade give you the softness and the colour without replacing anything that already works.

Two details matter. The mounting depth, because there has to be room for the drapery hardware to clear the existing headrail. And the rod projection, so the panels hang in front of the shade rather than against it. Both are checked on the measure.

If you are replacing the shades too, it is worth doing both at once: we can specify the shade and the drapery against each other rather than matching one to the other afterwards.

Yes. Decorative rods, finials, rings and brackets, concealed traverse rods, ripplefold track and motorized track. We specify and supply the hardware with the drapery, and install both.

It matters that they are specified together. The heading you choose decides which hardware can carry it, and the weight of a lined and interlined panel decides the bracket spacing and whether a wide span needs a centre support. Hardware bought separately from the drapery is where a lot of sagging rods come from.

Sometimes, and we will be straight with you about it. Customer’s own material is workable, but it comes with real caveats: no one can warrant a fabric they did not supply, the workroom cannot replace yardage if the pattern repeat means more is needed than you bought, and some fabrics are simply not suitable for drapery. Too light to hang, too unstable to hem straight, or prone to shrinking once lined.

Before you buy anything, bring us the fabric or a sample and we will tell you honestly whether it will make good drapery. That conversation costs nothing and it has saved a lot of people a lot of money.

In practice most people stop worrying about it once they see the library. We carry hundreds of designer fabric books, and you are welcome to borrow the ones you like and take them home.

We do the design, the measuring, the specification and the installation, and we commission the fabrication through drapery workrooms we have used for years, choosing the one that suits the job.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is a strength rather than a hedge. A workroom that is excellent at hand-finished interlined panels is not necessarily the one you want for a forty-foot ripplefold track. We pick per job, and we stand behind the result either way.

The install is entirely ours, with our own team, never subcontracted. We serve Portland, South Portland, Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Brunswick, Kennebunk, York and the surrounding towns. Our showroom is at 936 Brighton Avenue in Portland.