Curtains in Toronto

Why curtains, in these houses

On a new build a curtain is usually a decorative decision layered over a blind that is already doing the work. In Toronto’s older housing the order reverses, and it is worth saying why before any conversation about fabric.

Three things about a pre-war house make a curtain the load-bearing product rather than the pretty one.

The windows leak. A single-glazed sash with a storm outside it, or an early replacement unit in a tired frame, loses heat by air movement as much as by conduction. Cold air falling off the pane spills across the floor, and the room feels several degrees colder than the thermostat says at the far end. A blind on brackets does almost nothing about that; a lined curtain closing against the wall does a great deal.

The ceilings are high. Ten and eleven feet is ordinary in these houses. A blind finishes at the top of the window frame and leaves everything above it bare, which in a tall room makes the window look like a hole in a wall. A curtain hung near the cornice takes the eye up and makes the window read as the full height of the room. That is not decoration for its own sake — it is the thing that makes a Victorian room look right rather than furnished for a bungalow.

The rooms have proportions somebody thought about. Mouldings, picture rails, plaster cornices. A soft vertical at each side of a window sits in that language. A hard horizontal line across it frequently does not.

None of that means a blind is wrong in an old house. It means that in the front room of a semi off the Danforth, a curtain is often solving the actual complaint and the blind is solving a different one.

The track is the measurement, not the window

This is the thing people are least prepared for, and it is where most of the decisions live.

A blind is measured to the opening. A curtain is measured to a track, and the track’s position is a choice made before any number is taken. Get it wrong and no fabric rescues it.

Height. Above the frame, always. How far above depends on the ceiling, on whether there is a picture rail, and on what the room is for. In a ten-foot room we are usually looking at somewhere between fifteen and thirty centimetres above the frame, or tight under the cornice where the room can carry it. A track sitting on the frame is the single most common reason a curtain looks wrong in a room like this.

Width. Wider than the window on both sides, so that when the curtains are open they stack on the wall rather than on the glass. On a narrow Toronto lot the wall either side of a front window is often only twenty or thirty centimetres, which is not enough for a full stack — so either the curtain covers part of the glass when open, or the fullness comes down, or the stack goes deeper and narrower. That trade gets made in the room with a tape, not on a form.

What the wall is made of. Plaster on lath over a masonry wall is what most of these houses have above a window, and it is not a material you can put a bracket into anywhere you like. Finding the timber, or fixing to the frame, or using a fitting that spreads the load, is decided when we can knock on it.

The part of the lining decision that is about February

What the four lining choices are, what fullness means and why two quotes for the same cloth differ by half are all on the curtains page. One thing is specific to an old Toronto house and it matters more than which lining you pick.

A curtain only insulates if it closes against something.

Cold air falling off a single-glazed sash has to go somewhere. If the curtain has a gap at the top, the cold air spills over it into the room and warm room air is drawn in behind to replace it — so the curtain becomes a chimney rather than a barrier, and the glass gets more of the room’s heat rather than less.

Three details turn a fabric panel into a thermal object, and none of them is the lining:

A pelmet or a closed head. Something across the top so air cannot fall over the track. A board, a deep fascia, or a track recessed into a boxed head.

A return at each end. The curtain finishing against the wall rather than in mid-air, so the sides are closed too.

A hem that passes the sill. Stopping at the sill leaves the coldest part of the window — the bottom, where the falling air is — outside the curtain.

Get those three and a standard lining outperforms an interlined curtain hanging loose. Get none of them and the most expensive lining in the book is decoration.

The Toronto-specific complication is the radiator, which is under the window in a good share of these houses and which makes the third point impossible. There the honest answer is sill length and a blind doing the perimeter work, or accepting that this window is not the one the heat argument applies to.

Length: three that are right and one that is not

To the sill. Finishing just above it. Correct where a radiator sits under the window, which in these houses is most of the time.

Below the sill. Ten to fifteen centimetres past, hanging in front of the wall. Better than sill length where there is no radiator and the window is short.

To the floor. Brushing it, or breaking on it by a couple of centimetres. Correct in a formal room and the only length that works in a room with real height.

Anything else. A curtain finishing halfway down a wall, or floating three centimetres above the floor, reads as a mistake even to people who could not say why.

The radiator is the Toronto-specific complication. A floor-length curtain hanging in front of a cast-iron radiator traps the heat behind the fabric, where the room does not get it and the window does. In those rooms the honest answer is sill length, or a curtain that stops above the radiator and a blind doing the rest.

The picture rail, which decides the height for you

A great many Toronto houses built before about 1930 still have a picture rail running around the room — a moulded timber strip six or twelve inches below the ceiling, put there so pictures could hang from hooks without putting nails in plaster.

It is the single most useful thing in the room for this decision, and it is usually treated as an obstacle.

It gives you the line. A track set just below the picture rail reads as deliberate, because the room already has a horizontal at that height and the eye accepts a second one aligned to it. A track set at an arbitrary height between the window frame and the rail creates a third line competing with the first two, and it looks wrong in a way people notice without being able to say why.

It is timber, and timber holds. Where the rail is original and sound, it is often the only reliable fixing on a lath-and-plaster wall. The bracket can go into the rail itself or into the wall immediately below it where the framing behind is usually more substantial.

It sets a maximum. Above the rail is not an option in most rooms — a track fixed over a picture rail looks like it was installed by somebody who did not see the rail. So the rail becomes the ceiling for this decision, and the question narrows to how far below it the track sits.

Two cases where the rail does not settle it. If it has been removed in one room and survives in the next — common where a house has been partly renovated — the two rooms will want different heights and matching them makes one of them wrong. And if the rail sits unusually low, as it does in some smaller rooms, hanging tight under it can put the curtain head below where the proportions want it, and the honest answer is to ignore it and take the height from the window instead.

Worth mentioning at the measure whether the rail is original, added later or about to be removed, because all three change the answer.

Bays, corners, and the awkward Toronto window

A bay. Three or five facets meeting at angles that are rarely the tidy numbers a drawing would use. The track is bent to the actual bay, templated in the room. The decision to make first is where the stack lives, because on a bay with short returns there is nowhere for a full stack of fabric to go except across some glass.

A window beside a door. Common on a semi’s front elevation. The track has to clear the door swing and the stack has to not sit in the entry, which usually means drawing to one side rather than parting in the middle.

A window in a corner. Two windows meeting near a corner need either one continuous bent track or two tracks with a deliberate join. Two tracks butting at a corner with no thought looks like an accident.

A window with a working sash. If you open it, the curtain has to clear the lift and the lock. Worth mentioning at the measure, because the fix is easy in advance and impossible afterwards.

Curtains over a blind, which is the common answer here

In a good number of the rooms we quote, the honest recommendation is both.

The blind takes the day: glare on a screen, the afternoon sun off a west-facing front room, privacy from a sidewalk a few metres away. It is easy to adjust and it sits close to the glass.

The curtain takes the evening and the winter: closing the room in, cutting the draught, softening the acoustics, and making the window look like part of a room rather than an aperture in it.

The reason to do both deliberately rather than one after the other is depth. The blind has to sit inside the opening or tight to it, and the track has to be far enough forward that the curtain passes without catching. Decided together, that is free. Decided a year apart, it is often a blind that has to come down.

What the visit involves

The track gets decided before anything is measured — height, width, where the stack goes, what the wall above the window is made of. That conversation is most of the visit and it is the part that cannot happen on a form.

Then the numbers, then the fabric, held up in the room in the room’s own light and at the height it will actually hang, because a swatch flat on a table tells you almost nothing about how a cloth falls.

You keep a written quote itemised per window, with the fullness, the heading, the lining and the track stated. Nothing owed either way.

Last updated 9 August 2026.