Sill Shade is a window treatment guide written by people who have actually made curtains for a living — for more than 60 years.
Our family has run a curtain workroom and fabric shop since the 1960s. Across three generations we have measured thousands of windows, sewn everything from cafe curtains to floor-to-ceiling blackout drapes, and fixed just about every curtain mistake a home can make. Sill Shade is where we write that experience down.
The Workroom Behind the Website
The workroom is NTS Curtain, in Bangkok’s Phahurat textile district — a neighborhood that has traded fabric for over a century. On a normal week the team is out measuring windows, cutting and sewing panels, bending ceiling tracks around bay corners, and installing curtains, sheers, roman shades, wood blinds and roller shades in homes, offices and storefronts. The shop’s own site is at ntscurtain.com.
Why an English Guide From a Bangkok Workroom
Search for curtain advice in the US and most of what you find is written by retailers — and retailer advice reliably ends at “buy ours.” We do not sell curtains, rods or blinds to American readers, and nothing on this site is stocked, sponsored or commissioned. That leaves us free to tell you when a cheaper option is the better one, and when no ready-made product will fix your window at all.
The physics does not change between Bangkok and Boston. A drop is a drop, fullness is fullness, and a rod mounted too low makes a ceiling feel low in any hemisphere. Window sizes and product names differ by market, so every guide here is written to US conventions — inches, US ceiling heights, and the terms American stores actually use.
How We Decide What to Recommend
Every number on this site comes off a tape measure or a workroom table, not a brochure. When we say panels need two to two-and-a-half times the rod width to look full, that is how we cut fabric for paying customers. When we steer real wood blinds away from bathrooms, it is because we have replaced enough warped ones to know better. Where advice depends on a measurement, we give the measurement; where it depends on taste, we say so.
What We Don’t Do
No affiliate links. No sponsored posts. No “10 best curtains to buy right now” lists built from other people’s product photos. If a type of hardware or fabric is named in a guide, it is because we cut it, hang it, or have repaired its failures — not because anyone paid for the mention.
Who Writes This
Guides are credited to the Sill Shade Workroom Team: the family that runs the workroom plus the senior installers who have spent decades on ladders. We write from practice, then edit into plain English for US readers. If we get something wrong, tell us — corrections make the guides better for the next reader.
Where to Start
Most readers land here mid-project. If that is you: how to measure curtains gets you the right numbers, standard curtain sizes turns them into a size you can order, and the curtain guides hub has every guide on the site in one place.