Masking functional curtain rods

When this house was built, the dining room had a neat bow window with a window seat, looking south to the lawn and garden of the church next door. (The church building itself was on the far corner of an extra large lot.) Sometime mid-century (we believe at the time the ceiling of the dining room was dropped to cover the box beams, and when the kitchen was remodeled to something workable), the bow window was removed. In an early example of re-use, re-cycle, a set of four sash windows, taken from another house of the same period, were installed. The "new" windows don't quite fit the space -- they are huge (169", 429 cm), taking up the whole wall. The woodwork had to be cut narrower on one side, where the frame abuts an interior corner.

In the 1960's, when attendance was at a peak (from what we can tell, a steep and lonely peak), the charming small Victorian church was torn down, and the entire lot filled with an ugly cement slab church. The nave runs parallel to our house, 16 feet (4.8m) across a not-to-code driveway, three-stories tall. So, the large block of windows, which must have been such a wonderful change in 1948, now looks out onto a looming gray expanse. Sunlight peeks over the steepled roof only in high summer, bathing the dining room in hot light from dawn until near dusk. In winter, the east winds howl down the colorless canyon.

I am much more of a "curtain" person than the other members of the household, and one of the main changes that has occurred since I moved here is that gradually, all the windows are getting covered. This is the first winter we've had curtains in the dining room. We've been using tension rods for the last couple of months, which just looks weird with floor-length sort-of lined curtains (shown here), but finally last week we installed a proper rod, so now the whole set of windows can become a dark red fabric wall, holding back the frigid winds.

The delay was caused by the mural. HomoDommi is illustrating every square inch of wall space. Coincidentally, he had painted a steep bluff overhanging an inlet of the Pacific, to represent the south coast Oregon, right where the window frame met the wall. Right where a standard curtain rod would block the view.

The shallowest "rod" I could find proved to be an Ikea Digitet -- that is, a wire, slung about 2.5 inches (6.3cm) from the wall. Curtains are hung via little clips that slide onto the wire. Very practical, opens and closes well, but far more functional than attractive.

What we did was "pull" out the woodwork to in front of the curtain rod. That is, get some more wood, and hang a sort of box over the top of the window. Sort of like a wooden valance, but less intrusive or decorative than a true valance. As we hoped, it just fades into the woodwork -- which it should, because it is, ahem, woodwork. I got the idea from an article about someone updating their own turn-of-the-last-century house, where they covered insufficient windows with these woodwork-like valances. In that case, they hung the valance at the very top of the wall, so the woodwork blended in with the crown molding. The floor-to-ceiling curtains made a dramatic statement in that household. We had a different goal.

And it works to not-entirely cover HomoDommi's wonderful seacoast.