Many years ago we bought a house of that vintage. I went to the Beamis Bag Company and bought a bolt of burlap and made drapes for the whole house.Burlap does present some problems. It's hard on your hands. Figure on getting your machine cleaned completely when you're thru. If you get a good quality burlap (you should) it has some body but it's a little stiff and takes some persuading to drape nicely but it is a wonderful texture and color. The quality does matter. I looked at the decorator stuff and almost decided against using burlap. But the best commercial bag material was very different and it was still quite cheap. If you are going to make roman shades(not very difficult) you might consider some iron on backing. I would simplify everything. Good luck..I think you'll have fun.

Kswl, Thank you for your note. We know that the sky is the limit, creatively speaking, but we wanted to try to figure out which looks best mounted outside of the window frame. It looks like we are going with above the architrave and below the crown moulding and extending the rods out past the edge of the window moulding so most of the window is exposed when the drapes are open. Powermuffin, We have all brand-new trim and drywall so, thankfully and not so thankfully, we get to chose where to put the holes and get to make them. :P Ineffablespace, Inside the window frame was considered but since a lot of the windows are narrow compared with their height, we felt drapes within the window frames would crowd it up too much. Errant, It seems now that is what we will do. Few people have suggested mounting the rod to the flat part of the architrave, which we are keen to avoid doing as best possible. It seems easier to patch and fill drywall rather than woodwork and we will be sure to use some generous/strong anchors. Marti8a, Thank you! All of the moulding is a mixture of custom, milled to order, and moulding from Home Depot and Lowes. The fun part was arranging it all in such a way to give it a depth and richness that most people would never assume comes from a big box store. All of it is paint grade (we never had plans to stain it) and much of it is built up out of several pieces. I think in our coffered ceiling we utilized four or five different profiles. It was tedious at times but well worth it. Patty_cakes, The windows were put in before the renovation started (long story...) and probably will be replaced a few years down the road *if* we can find someone who can use these windows (hate making waste!). Some of them have trim only on the outside (with a paintable inner composite frame) and others are boxed in with wood on the inside of the frame. It will all blend with some paint. It was easy to do with planning. Plenty of practice done on mitering corners and even used a coping saw! All others who mentioned shades inside the frame... I totally forget to mention!: We are putting cellular shades inside every window. Sorry for neglecting to mention this.

Thanks, and if anyone loves this style and isn't yet aware, there is a great thread in the Gallery... Here is a link that might be useful: Cottage thread

I have good news, Beth0301. While a whole room furnished in primitive/country things may not be at all to your liking, there's no reason you need to exclude everything in that style, especially if you like it. Too much of anything is never good, and moderation, in decorating, as in most things, is the key, but there's always room for Jello. Here in Chicago, there's a very elegant living room furnished in country French-style (and here, I mean the real thing: 18th century carved wood paneling, comfortable honey-colored Louis XV-style chairs upholstered in cotton velvet in dusty plums & aquas & mustards, footstools covered in faded ancient tapestry--not a bunch of curly iron doodads on the walls & roosters on all the cushions) and the first thing you see when you walk in is a giant 19th Century American whirlygig that probably started out on top of a barn. It works. In the banana yellow salon of a famous Chicago heiress, there was a gigantic jungle painting by Henri Rousseau hanging abouve a curvy 1770s Hepplewhite settee. The painting was worth millions of dollars, yes, but it was a primitve jungle scene nonetheless, at a time when all her moneyed friends were still going for sugary paintings of the Coy Shepherdess type. Again, the collision of Modernist art & traditional antiques worked. At my own place, on a pale Directoire demilune table I have a gold-plated French candleabra lamp & a 1950s kids' crafts project: a robot made from scrap wood, bottle caps & an emerald green anodized aluminum popcorn bowl. It looks great. In my old apartment I had a Chippendale-style table with a rotten, termite-eaten tree stump sitting on top. That little combination ended up in a magzine. Here's the thing: as long as something in a piece--color, shape, material, period, whatever--relates to the pieces around it, specifics of origin, "style" or expense are irrelevant. In the first example, the whirlygig's stiff lines & cracked weathered surfaces have nothing in common with the relaxed refinement of the other pieces in the Lake Shore Drive living room, but its soft, faded coloring makes the visual connection, and it looks great. In the yellow living room, too, it was the vibrant yellows & oranges of the painting that determined the colors in the room's furnishings, and made everything come together. In my current living room, the robot's specific colors harmonize with those in the room. but their brightness intensifies the contrast, while the curves of the robot's arms echoed the curving arms of the elegant candlestick lamp next to it. In my old aprtment, the roiling, twisting curves of the tree stump rhymed with the curves of my mahogany table's cabriole legs, while the color of the wood matched the chairs nearby. All those different approaches can work, & once you try them, you'll find that, rather than looking 'out-of-place', the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others quality of an unusual piece is often what will lift a room out of dull predictability into something much more interesting & non-cataloggy. I already quoted Dorothy Draper on another thread today, but for those who missed her words of wisdom the first time around, here they are again. "If it looks right, it is right." Regards, Magnaverde.