There are so many things to take into consideration when you’re redesigning a child’s room. Ruby is a lively, active two-year-old whose mother wanted to turn her baby room into a room that could grow with her daughter. With a toddler, safety is always a factor to your new décor. While a new bed, lamps, storage and chests of drawers need to be accessible and colorful, the room’s window treatments needed to be versatile, safe and stylish. Working with designer Joy Cho, who also happens to be Ruby’s mom, we managed to address the challenges of this particular room with fashionable and fabulous custom window treatments.
Joy’s vision for Ruby’s room was a colorful, big-girl room with sleek lines and contemporary styling. The window treatments had to complement that look and answer the practical needs of a toddler’s room: safety; light blocking; use throughout the day.
In addition, there were some unusual (read: challenging) features to the windows of Ruby’s room. One of the windows has a floor A/C hose that leads directly outside. It takes up 8 inches of space, but we needed to fit a small blackout shade in the space to cover it when the hose isn’t hooked up. The other oddity was to cover up the non-matching head rails. In addition, Ruby’s room has west- and south-facing single-panel windows that Joy wanted to be able to be in the room without it being fully dark, but still keep it cool in summer and warm in winter. It’s just these kind of challenges that give most people headaches when dealing with window treatments – and why they call us to help out!
In the end we went for a two-style solution. We used Hunter Douglas Duette Architella honeycomb shades with Duolite in white semi-opaque & blackout with the Easy-Rise system for the big windows. This allowed for a simple, streamlined look that can insulate from both the cold and the heat. The shades also let the room transition from light to dark and back again for sweeter naptimes and easier wakeups. The window section that houses the AC hose in summer was treated with a White Wood Havencrest Blind Valance with the Ultra Glide System. This matched the rest of the treatments while keeping the section separate for use only when it was needed.
It was a real pleasure to work with Joy! She was delighted with the solutions we came up with and I’m so proud of the final result: it has all the options Joy was hoping for and the look and style she envisioned. Ruby loved it, too! It was worth every minute of planning to get the look they wanted, with the functionality they needed.
