Bedroom curtains in Hyderabad

A bedroom curtain has one job before it has a style: it has to let you sleep. Everything else — the fabric, the colour, the heading — sits underneath that.

In this city that usually means dealing with the building opposite, the corridor light on the landing, and a west or east window that does not care what time you went to bed. This is the general case, and the four rooms we are asked about most are linked at the end.

What a bedroom curtain has to do

• Stop light at the edges, not only through the cloth.
• Give you privacy after dark. A sheer alone is daylight privacy. At night, with the lamps on, it is a silhouette.
• Help the room hold temperature. A lined curtain on the glass takes the edge off the heat, and off the early-morning chill of an AC set too low.
• Open with one hand at half past six in the morning. A heading that jams is a heading you will stop using.

What is different about a Hyderabad bedroom

The light you are blocking is mostly not the sun. Summer sunrise here is around half past five and the room is bright by six, which is the reason people usually give for wanting blackout. The bigger one is at night. Gated developments run security and pathway lighting until dawn, and most bedroom windows in a tower face either that or another building. A curtain that handles a half-past-five sunrise but not a floodlight thirty feet away has solved the smaller half of the problem.

The tower opposite is closer than you think. Density means a bedroom window often looks at another flat across a gap of thirty or forty feet, at the same height. Daytime privacy in a bedroom is therefore a real requirement here and not an afterthought — which is the argument for a sheer behind the main curtain rather than a single layer that is either open or shut.

A lining does work the air conditioning would otherwise do. On a west-facing bedroom the wall and the glass hold heat well into the evening, which is exactly when you want the room cool. A lined curtain drawn before the sun comes round is the cheapest intervention available, and it is noticeable on the room rather than theoretical.

Blackout means the edges, not the cloth. This is the thing most people are surprised by. A blackout lining stops light through the fabric completely; what gets past it is the gap at the sides, the gap at the top, and any seam. Which is why a blackout job is really a question about the track, the return at each end and the width of the fabric — not about buying a darker curtain. The full system is written up here.

Blackout, dimout, or a layer

True blackout is a lining, not a marketing word on a packet. The face cloth can still be linen, cotton, a velvet — whatever the room needs. The lining is what makes the room go dark.

Use full blackout in the main bedroom if you are a light sleeper, if you work shifts, or if there is a tower or a streetlight in the sightline. Use dimout if you would rather the room woke with the day. Layer a sheer behind a blackout if you want filtered light in the afternoon and darkness at night — that is two tracks, and it is the arrangement most master bedrooms here end up with.

A Roman blind or a roller inside the reveal, with curtains stacking off the glass, is often the cleanest answer in a bedroom with a tight window and no wall to park fabric.

Headings, fabric, length

Pinch pleat gives a tailored fold. Wave on a concealed track is cleaner on a wide window. Eyelet is simple and visible. Rod-pocket and tab-top drag when you open them every day — and a bedroom curtain is opened more often than any other in the house.

Heavy velvet has a place in a large, air-conditioned bedroom and nowhere in a small room that runs on a fan through April and May. Linen and linen blends keep a bedroom from feeling sealed, though in here they want a lining behind them.

Hang the track close to the ceiling. The hem should kiss the floor, or break by a centimetre. Puddling on a bedroom floor collects dust and is a trip hazard in the dark. And a balcony-attached bedroom needs the sliding door and the window treated as one run, or you will have a bright vertical gap where the two meet.

Which bedroom is it

• A master bedroom you want properly dark — the layering, the edges, and where the light actually gets in.
• A master bedroom with an attached balcony — a door you use daily and a curtain that has to live with it.
• A child’s bedroom — where cords and reachable hardware change the answer.
• A toddler or infant’s room — daytime naps, which is a harder light problem than night.

We measure, make and hang curtains ourselves, from the showroom on Road No. 12, Banjara Hills — House No 536, first floor, NBT Nagar, opposite the Triumph showroom, Monday to Saturday, 11am to 8.30pm. Bring the room’s measurements if you have them. A site visit is ₹500, and it comes off the bill if you go ahead.