How we kitted out our bedroom with matching curtains and roman blinds

Our bedroom has four windows: full-length French doors onto the garden, a matching pair of small windows either side of the bed, and a fourth in the adjoining dressing room. The French doors clearly wanted heavy, full-length curtains. The other three are nowhere near big enough to carry floor-to-ceiling drapes, so roman blinds were the obvious answer — which left us with the usual problem: getting blinds and curtains to genuinely match, rather than landing on "a similar shade of blue" from two different ranges.

Rather than pricing up fully bespoke fabric for both, we worked backwards from a ready-made curtain we already liked. We chose Dunelm's Luxe Deco cut velvet eyelet curtains for the French doors — the velvet has enough weight to hang properly at full length. Instead of buying a single pair, we bought several sets of the exact same curtains up front.

One pair went straight up at the French doors. The rest we sent to Curtains and Blinds 4 Homes' own-fabric service, who make up curtains and roman blinds from fabric you supply — including fabric that's already been cut and sewn as curtains, which is exactly the position we were in. They turned the spare sets into three roman blinds: one for each side of the bed, and one for the dressing room window.

The whole point of buying multiple sets of the same product, rather than sourcing "coordinating" fabric separately for the blinds, is that there is nothing left to match: every window has the same product on it. The curtains and the blinds came from the same production run, so there's no dye-lot variation between them, and the texture and sheen line up exactly. It also worked out cheaper — ready-made curtains cost far less per metre of fabric than buying the equivalent by the roll, so even after paying to have the spare sets made up, we came in under the price of bespoke curtains and blinds.

If you're trying to match curtains and blinds across windows that aren't all the same size, buying a couple of extra sets of ready-made curtains and having the spares made up into blinds is worth considering before you start hunting for a fabric that coordinates — it's the surest way to get an exact match rather than a close one.

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