The designers who direct the master classes here have a sense of drama. They are generally from the same decorative arts background as those who make classic drapes, but they have used their skills differently, achieving quite startling results. They play with their knowledge and consistently bend and break the rules—but you can’t do that unless you know exactly what the rules are.

These creators have an innate sense of the dramatic. From the shell of a room, they can compose an entire family history, much as an art director might dress a set for a long running family saga. Starting from an eighteenth-century, classical base, they will imagine which much-loved pieces of furniture would have grown shabby and scuffed with age, which items would have been thrown out or recovered or remodeled, and what little touches might have been added over the years. This is where you find fortune silks mixed with chain mail, sheer silk curtains trimmed with crystal drops, hand painted murals, recreations of Chinese silk wallpapers, and other heady examples of theatrical flamboyance.

Dramatic style is flattering, both to the ego and the skin tones In your own personal theater you can shine It is in interiors such as these that I have seen mirrored tops on dining tables, the better to reflect the shimmer of silver, glass, and jewelry, and lighting effects borrowed from film sets, in which everyone looks glamorous. The stage is bordered by dramatic sweeps of curtain, framing the action taking place in the room.
These are the designers to turn to if your home is cursed with less-than-perfect window proportions,