Aktillery's advice is excellent. Not only will it provide more light control, placement at the ceiling draws the eye up, making the room feel taller and more spacious. A room-darkening shade mounted outside the frame (use wall anchors) will provide best coverage. There are hundreds of choices of panels, from light sheers to heavy tapestry. It's okay if they hang behind the bed, it will look nice with or without a headboard.

Yes we need to open the windows a lot there is no A/C (coastal town, ocean breezes!). We can't have blinds with cords of any sort due to toddler safety and as it turns out there are no cordless blind options I can find in 93" and greater widths. So curtains it is! Good point about the air flow, too! I like a double rod with sheers underneath (there are neighbors behind) and room darkening on top for the bedrooms. Now the question is to have them be just the height of the windows (i.e. Hang rod just over window top and have curtain cone to sill) or visually lengthen by hanging the rods at the ceiling and having curtains go to the floor. I generally prefer that look and will do that in the living room (just sheers) but in the bedrooms we may need to place furniture under the windows, in which case shorter curtains would make sense, but may look odd? hamamalis, we just replaced these windows with dual pane low e in the same size (after photos taken). The living room windows face the street this is a city house so no sweeping views here! Reframing walls is very expensive here due to labor costs so enlarging the windows didn't seem worth it. I would have added a window to the right of the fireplace to balance things, but the cost was high. We have a large glass wall and patio slider in the dining area which leads to our side yard, so that's our best view/ outdoor interaction. Eventually we may add a French door to the backyard at the end of the hallway which currently terminates in a linen closet - for more light and connection with the backyard.

Hey There: Longer Curtains don't really make your window appear bigger - it will look pretty funny at the end. Beth H. has the best suggestion...with the trim you make your window appear bigger. And if budget allows it, replace them with taller units...will make a huge difference in the feel of the room. Good Luck with your project.

Vent-a-Hood is another option, they have many models that would fit your 21" height requirement. 21" is not that bad in terms of available height, you should have a lot of options: https://ventahood.com/index.php/products/application/wall-mounted ModernAire is another one, this is just one of their hoods available in a 36" x 18" size https://modernaire.com/wall-hoods/ps-10/ All the best,