I used to think hanging curtains was basically foolproof—you buy the rod, stick it above the window, done.
Turns out the height you choose changes everything about how a room feels, and I mean everything. When I first moved into my apartment with its aggressively average 8-foot ceilings, I hung curtains the “normal” way: right above the window frame, maybe an inch or two of clearance. The room felt like a shoebox. Then a friend who does staging for real estate told me something that sounded ridiculous at first—mount the rod as close to the ceiling as possible, even if it looks absurd when the curtains are open. She was right, and I was annoyed about how right she was. The vertical lines created by floor-to-ceiling fabric panels trick your brain into reading the walls as taller than they actually are. It’s the same principle behind why fashion magazines tell short people to wear vertical stripes, except it definately works better on windows than on humans, in my experience.
The Actual Measurements That Interior Designers Use (And Why They’re Annoyingly Specific)
Here’s the thing: most professionals mount curtain rods about 4 to 6 inches below the ceiling, not right at the window frame.
If your ceilings are 8 feet, that means your rod goes at roughly 90-94 inches from the floor—which feels wrong when you’re standing there with a pencil marking the wall, I’m not going to lie. For 9-foot ceilings, you’d go up to around 102-106 inches, give or take. The curtains themselves should puddle slightly on the floor or just barely kiss it, which adds to that elongated effect. I’ve seen people get anxious about the gap between the rod and the window top, worrying about light leakage or whatever, but honestly that gap is what sells the illusion. Your eye travels up the fabric line and keeps going toward the ceiling instead of stopping at the window. Some designers go even more extreme and mount the rod literally 2 inches from the ceiling molding, but that requires longer panels and sometimes custom lengths, which gets expensive fast. Standard 96-inch panels work for most 8-foot ceilings if you mount high, though you might need 108-inch or even 120-inch panels for taller rooms or if you want that pooling effect.
The Width Trick That Nobody Talks About But Probably Should Because It Matters As Much As Height
Wait—maybe more important than height is how far you extend the rod beyond the window frame.
The general rule is 4 to 8 inches on each side, sometimes more if you’ve got wall space. This does two things: when the curtains are open, they’re not blocking any actual window (so you get maximum light), and when they’re closed, they cover more wall space, which again makes the window—and by extension the wall—look bigger. I used to mount rods that were exactly window-width, and it made everything look cramped and kind of sad. Now I go at least 6 inches past the frame on both sides, sometimes 10 if the room allows it. The brain reads the fabric edges as the window boundaries, not the actual glass. Combine the width extension with the ceiling-height mounting and you’ve basically created a fake window that’s maybe 30% larger than reality, which sounds like cheating but is actually just… interior design, I guess.
Anyway, hardware matters too but not in the way you’d think.
People get obsessed with fancy finials and decorative rods, but if you’re mounting near the ceiling, you barely see that stuff—it’s too high. I’d invest money in the curtains themselves (linen or heavyweight cotton in light colors work best for the height illusion) and just use simple matte black or white rods. Also, this probably goes without saying, but avoid short “café style” curtains or anything that ends at the windowsill. Those cut the wall in half visually and make ceilings look lower, the exact opposite of what we’re trying to acheive here. Oh, and one last thing I learned the hard way: if you’re renting and can’t drill into the ceiling area, tension rods won’t work for this—they don’t go high enough and can’t support the weight of long panels. You’ll need to either negotiate with your landlord or accept regular-height curtains, which is frustrating but better than having a rod crash down at 3am.
