This Detail Automatically Makes a Traditional House Feel Moody

Interior designer Tess Twiehaus begins her projects by brainstorming a list of keywords with her clients—descriptors of how they ultimately want their house to look and feel. “Light” and “airy” come up a lot, but that’s not what she heard when she sat down with a fashion-obsessed 30-something who had recently bought a 1,500 square foot Spanish-style home in Los Angeles. “One of the phrases that kept coming back up was ‘very sexy,’” says the Tess Interiors founder. It naturally led them down a path of black accents, ranging from zellige tile in the kitchen to a Nickey Kehoe pendant lamp in the dining room, but it also inspired them to go superdark in an unexpected place: the curtains. 

“If you go into a cool hotel room, you’re usually going to be faced with darker window treatments, so we wanted to lean into that and make it a total vibe, a total escape,” says Twiehaus.

In the primary bedroom, the designer took a color-drenching approach. Once she landed on the green paint for the walls, window trim, and closet, she chose a James Malone fabric for the curtains in a forest green.

The bathroom took on a blue theme, so she topped the space off with navy café curtains that offer a layer of privacy around the tub. Given Twiehaus was buying fabric by the yard anyway, it made economical sense to swath the windows in the guest bedroom in the same midnight hue, too, this time opting for roman shades that complement the romance of the home’s original wood windows.  

Twiehaus’s go-to fabricator, Heritage Draperies, sewed all of the panels and secured the hardware, because to her, it’s worth splurging on customization. “The biggest thing you’re purchasing is the tailoring and execution,” says the designer. When she’s spending the money to go bespoke, she almost always asks for pinch pleats and, in the case of drapes, just a quarter-inch pooling on the floor. “It really comes down to the details,” she adds. 

While you’d expect dark fabric in front of small windows in a tiny house to make the whole place feel like a cave, the trick is in the fabric. Twiehaus chose a textile (linen) that’s translucent by nature, so it still allows plenty of rays to filter in. It’s just a different type of light and airy.

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