A North York Home, Reimagined Room by Room
Some projects are a single room. This one was a whole home — every window, every light condition, every mood, considered from the front door up. When the homeowners brought us into their North York property, the architecture was already doing a lot of the work: soaring windows, warm herringbone floors, a grand piano waiting for its moment in the afternoon sun. Our job was to make sure the light treated every one of those rooms the way it deserved to.
Here’s the walkthrough, room by room, the way you’d actually experience the house.
The Entry: A Quiet First Impression
Before a treatment was even in the running for the entry, we solved the simplest problem first: the glass door faces straight out onto the street. Rather than dress a doorway that should stay architectural, we applied a privacy film directly to the glass — invisible from a normal viewing distance, but enough to keep the entry private without a single fold of fabric in sight.
The Great Room & Dining Room: Letting the Piano Have the Room
This home’s open-concept great room and dining room share one long run of windows, and we treated them as one continuous statement: floor-to-ceiling sheer drapery in a soft ivory, chosen to match the classic, elegant feeling the homeowners wanted around their grand piano. Watch the way the light ripples through the folds in the late afternoon — that’s the fabric doing exactly what it was chosen to do, diffusing the sun instead of flattening the room.
The Kitchen: A Touch of Europe Over the Sink
For the kitchen, the homeowners wanted something with texture — a little Old World character against all that grey-veined marble. We landed on bamboo roman shades: warm, woven, and filtering the western light beautifully over the sink without trapping the steam and moisture a kitchen window deals with every day.
The Home Office: Bright, But Not Blinding
The home office needed daylight for focus, not glare on a screen. A soft sheer here does the job quietly — enough light to work by, enough softness that video calls never fight the window behind them.
The Staircase: A Small Window, Fully Considered
Easy to overlook, but this narrow stairwell window got the same care as anywhere else in the house. We fitted it with a brown fabric roman shade finished with a decorative pom trim — the same detailing carried upstairs into the kids’ room, so the home reads as one story instead of a collection of separate rooms.
The Primary Bedroom: Beige, Walnut, and Total Control
Upstairs, the primary bedroom called for a fully layered approach: blackout curtains paired with a sheer, both in a beige tone chosen to sit perfectly against the room’s walnut and ivory palette. Sheers open for soft morning light; the blackout layer closes for real, uninterrupted dark — the kind of flexibility a primary bedroom should have as standard.
The Kids’ Room: A Little Whimsy, On Purpose
Kids’ rooms get to have a little more fun, and this one does. We built the blackout curtains here with a pieced, colour-blocked fabric design and finished them with decorative pom poms — playful details that give the room its own personality while still delivering full blackout for nap time and early bedtimes.
The Bathroom: Privacy That Adjusts With the Day
The primary bathroom’s freestanding tub sits right at the window line, so privacy couldn’t be an afterthought. We chose light-filtering Vienna shades, which let the homeowners tilt the angle through the day — open for light while the room is in use, closed down in seconds whenever privacy matters more.
The Computer Room: Built for Daytime Gaming
This one came with a very specific brief: the young couple wanted to game during the day without a hint of daylight on their screens. We fitted the room with blackout cellular shades, which shut out the sun completely and happen to suit the room’s black-on-black styling perfectly. It’s become their favourite room in the house — for good reason.
Tying It All Together
Every shade and curtain in this home connects to Control4 and runs on Somfy motors, so the homeowners can set the whole house’s light with one tap — sheers open in the great room, blackout down in the computer room, all from the same app. That’s really the thread through this whole project: nine rooms, nine different jobs for the light to do, all working as one considered system by the time we were done.
If your home has a window — or a whole house full of them — that hasn’t found its match yet, we’d love to take a look. Get in touch for a free consultation and we’ll start where we always do: with your light.
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*Project location: North York, ON*
