The Window Treatments in Our Primary Bedroom, New Orleans Home

Two years ago we designed our New Orleans home’s primary bedroom suite to be one big, open, bright and airy space for spending the evenings. One of our biggest goals for the direction of this room was to make it feel like its own little oasis separated from the outside world and perched in a lively old oak tree, like a tree house but with central air conditioning. It’s the only room on the second floor of our home and so we really wanted it to be a special space just for us.

The footprint of the room was meant to push your eyes out towards the gorgeous canopy of the oak tree that reaches over and through our backyard. To achieve that we added a fifth centered window to complement the other four and extended all of the windows to seven feet in height and painted the room a simple but beautiful white, fittingly called Pure White (Sherwin Williams SW 70005). We oriented the bed to face the windows, and the bathroom to accept every inch of the daytime glow.

We also opted to leave the windows bare, no drapes or shades or blinds to obstruct the view. We’d wake up with the sun and sleep under the stars! Lucky for us the room was situated so that it’s kind of hard to see in unless you’re really trying, so we weren’t very concerned with our, you know, butts being on display for our neighbors.

In the18 months since it’s been completed, we have absolutely loved having the windows bare. The early mornings being greeted by the sun, and being able to see the night sky from bed has been pretty much magical, and in another home, assuming the bedroom was positioned as privately as this one is, I’d certainly consider going with bare windows again.

But never in a million years will I do that again in New Orleans (dear God no). The summer here is brutal. Not like regular brutal—I spent the last few months at our Tennessee home listening to Tennesseans complain about the horrible summer heat and had to stop myself from screaming “YOU THINK THIS IS HOT? YOU DON’T KNOW TRUE HEAT!”

New Orleans summer heat is simply a different animal. It’s a combination of swampy humidity and lots of concrete trapping and warming up air that’s so thick you have to wade through it. This kind of heat is not for the faint-hearted, it’s an unrelenting invisible force that carries on into the nighttime, making for early mornings and late nights that feel as hot the rest of the day, just darker.

All of that constant intense mugginess + being on the second floor + direct morning light = upstairs got hot as hell. The first summer we were able to deal with it. Perhaps blinded by our newly finished bedroom we didn’t mind that the temperature was hard to keep cool. Just part of the charm, perhaps! But this summer we had a “heat dome,” which is just meteorology speak for “it’s hot everywhere and you can’t escape it lol” and the upstairs couldn’t take it. When we left for the July & August we set the air condition to 80 degrees in hopes it would help keep the space from melting, but, well, it didn’t. It apparently stayed so hot for so long that our air conditioner kept running until the condenser just… blew. A one year old air conditioning unit. It said “screw it, I don’t care if you live or die, I’m out.”

We had already had the thought that leaving the windows bare for another summer was just plain energy inefficient and decided we’d put treatments up before the summer heat came. Before we left for the Tennessee property for all of July & August we ordered black out window treatments for all the windows with the hopes they could help temps stay low by keeping out the morning’s direct sunlight. But the shipping got delayed and they arrived shortly after we left, not to be installed until we came back in town.

So the window treatments were more of a need than a want, but we’ve come to love them. Roman shades with a modern pleating in a gorgeous cream color. Blackout curtains that turn this bright and airy room into a moody sleepy little space. My favorite feature? They’re motorized! With the press of a button they all rise or descend in tandem, which of course is very cool. It takes about 45 seconds for all seven feet of fabric to be neatly tucked up at the top of the window, and the technology is pretty simple, just a small remote and a rechargeable battery.

We purchased the shades where we get all of our Roman shades and blinds, Select Blinds. They make custom window treatments on a pretty quick timeframe and we’ve been happy with everything we’ve ordered from them—these bedroom shades are actually the fourth project we’ve done in this house that sourced from Select Blinds! We love them so much that we mention them as our go-to for window treatments in our book, Housewarming (grab yourself a copy if you don’t have one yet!). In terms of custom window treatments, Select Blinds is relatively affordable, but that being said, they’re still fairly pricey. That’s why we typically only purchase during sales, which happen every few months. Often they’ll give up to 40% off around most holidays and other sale events, and we almost always end up saving a couple hundred bucks! If you want to get the looks exactly as we have it, here are the deets: Roman Shade in Cosmic Ivory with Pleated Fold, Blackout Liner, Outside Mount, and Motorized Lift. Each of these shades would have been $550 but we got them for $330 a piece on sale, making this a $1600 project. Not cheap, but for such large windows I think it’s a great investment towards creating a more energy efficient space.

Thank you for stopping by the blog and as always please email, comment, or DM us any questions!

xoxo

Beau

& Matt & Fox & Barley & Rye