Window dressing

If there's one thing I learnt about dealing with contractors, it's what can go wrong will go wrong. But in the midst of all that went wrong, a couple of vendors came through with minimal hiccups. One of them was D'Zander, the curtains company.

I discovered D'Zander through the Internet when I was looking for recommendations. The name kept popping up with real users citing their quality, reliability and reasonable pricing. The lady I spoke to, Doris, provides excellent service and was able to give advice on what sort of fabric I should use, which I appreciated.

We wanted a neutral tone for the living/dining area. The walls are painted Barley White, which has a yellow tinge (it looks yellower in the picture than it actually is, due to the lighting). We used Nippon paint for the whole house. It's probably more expensive than the brand-less paint used by some contractors but we think it's worthwhile. We used Nippon paint at our current place and 11 years on, it still looks relatively fresh.

This is the living room:

And the dining room. We used sheer curtains as it leads out to the patio and wanted to extend the look of the area.

For the master bedroom, we also adopted a neutral tone. Doris was the one who suggested having the track all the way up to the false ceiling and tying the day and night curtains in opposite directions for the smaller window. I think the effect is pretty elegant, I would never have come up with this myself.

The wall colour is 8148 Peaceful (I'm noting down the colours for my own record, don't mind me).

We used the same fabric for my mother-in-law's room. Wall colour is 0012 Soft Sands.

For the kids' rooms, it was slightly more complicated. I find that most curtain companies stock very few fun fabrics, except for the very kiddy designs with cartoon characters. According to D'Zander, they're harder to sell, so not worth stocking up on.

For my kids, I couldn't find any design I liked so in the end, I turned to the quintessential fun company - Ikea. Ikea has many lovely fabric patterns - they're quirky and not too expensive. The downside is that they often run out of stock, especially for popular designs, and the quality tends to be inferior, eg. most of their fabrics shrink in the wash. So it's something you'll need to cater for.

Doris was very accommodating - she took the measurements of the windows and told me how much fabric to buy for each of the kids' rooms, then charged me only a minimal sum to sew the curtains for me.

Lesley-Anne wanted a room with blue accents so we picked out this rich blue fabric with white leaf patterns. Her walls are painted 8126 Comfort. It's a lovely creamy yellow, much nicer than it appears in the picture.

When I first asked Andre what colour he wanted his room to be, he told me "orange and fire engine red!" I'm not surprised - it shouts his personality - but I shuddered just thinking about such a gaudy room. So we compromised. I gave him one wall in orange and the others in yellow. The red would be accents in the form of his furniture. (His grandmother commented that she would need sunglasses just to enter his room, lol).

To contrast the orange wall, I chose a white cotton fabric with writing from Ikea for his curtains. It's very cute but it's a thin fabric so D'Zander had to line the curtains. The orange shade is 8117 Zing. Lesley-Anne commented that Andre's room looked delicious and was the "happy" room. It really is cheerful, which is great for a kid's room.

I recommend D'Zander whole-heartedly if you're thinking of making curtains. The number is 6276 9921. Ask for Doris.