Home Décor Industry and the Trend of Customization

There is a new trend in the home décor industry and that is the use of custom designed items to create a unique look in home interiors. People want their homes to reflect their personalities, their interests and to be completely different from the homes of others. It is an exciting time to be a decorator or interior designer, because there are endless design possibilities with very few restraints. In the past, the home décor industry has seen trends come and go. It is normal for one thing to be more popular for a period of time and then when something new is introduced to the public, the new thing replaces the old. It is also common for people to want to have whatever is popular in their homes. Consider if you will the changes that window treatments have gone through in the past few decades. The home décor industry uses window treatments as one of the major changes in a room’s décor. You can take a plain room with solid white walls and by applying different window treatments transform that room into a girl’s room, a boy’s room or an adult’s room. In the 1950s, you were bound to see café style curtains in the kitchens and the bathrooms of the majority of the homes you entered. These tiered curtains were usually in some shade of red or pink depending on the kitchen décor and often you saw bold fruit patterns on the material and different colors on the trim. The material was sometimes sheer and cotton as well as bark clothwas used to create these items. They required two rods to be hung over the window. One rod hung above the window casing to hold a curtain panel that acted as a valance of sorts and the second rod was placed midway over the length of the window to hold other panels that would reach the bottom edge of the window casing. In the living rooms, dens and most master bedrooms of the 1950s, you would likely see pinch pleated draperies used as the predominant window treatment. These draperies usually were hung high on the wall, above the window casing and they typically reached the floor of the room. Sometimes a person was daring and they had their draperies stop just below the window casing. These draperies were designed to block light from entering the room and to reduce the ability for people to be able to see into the room. They were made of heavy fabrics and often these fabrics had backings on them that were plastic. They were generally a solid color, but sometimes they had a geometric design imprinted in the fabric. The 1960s brought with them new window treatment styles. Beaded curtains were often hung over doorways to create a barrier of sorts and the window curtains were made from bolder colors with new designs imprinted on the fabrics. People were drifting away from the solid colored fabrics on their draperies and starting to choose bold designs, but floral patterns, leaves and depictions of horses were the most popular in most homes. During the 1960s, heavy draperies were still being predominantly used in areas like dens, living rooms and master bedrooms. There were a few homes that were beginning to use shades, but very few of them. It was the style to use draperies in your home décor and few people deviated from what was trending at the time. The 1970s did not see a lot of drastic changes in the window treatments that were used. People stuck with what was familiar to them and about the only real changes that they were bold enough to make were in the colors of the fabrics they chose for their draperies. The 1980s and the 1990s saw people start to use more shades as window treatments instead of just draperies. The mini-blinds became popular at this time. We had been seeing slatted blinds in commercial use for some time, but it was not until the 80s dawned that we started seeing them enter homes. The popularity of blinds was enormous and over these two decades, people experimented with different styles of blinds and with different applications. These items could be made from wooden slats, plastic slats or fabric panels. They were made in different colors, but for the large windows in a room, there were little choices in what blinds you could choose. There were some Roman shades that were large enough to cover big windows like people had in their living rooms or sliding glass doors that they had in their dining rooms. You pretty much had to buy the sizes that were available and you had a very slim selection of fabrics, colors and designs. In 2000, we started to see window treatments and home décor changing. People wanted to express their own sense of style instead of simply copying what everyone else was doing. The color choices for painting rooms suddenly became endless. Where once all living rooms were a shade of beige, suddenly it was not odd to walk into a home that had orange walls in the living area. Where people once hung draperies that covered the entire wall or blinds that were bland, there suddenly exploded new looks, textures, fabrics and colors over the windows of homes and commercial properties. 2000 brought individuality in the process of decorating a home. We are still using Roman blinds to cover large window areas. Let’s face it, these blinds work and when something works you do not change it. Except, companies like Ostanding have dared to change the Roman shades. Ostanding creates Roman shades to cover large windows and the customer gets to decide what will be printed on the fabric the shades are designed from. I do not mean that you have ten different colors or designs, and you choose from those. I mean that you can actually upload images that you want to have on the fabric. The shades are customized by the customer creating the fabric they like. There are some preselected designs on the Ostanding website that you can choose if you do not want to upload your own design, but you can upload any images, as long as they are not copyright protected to the site and have them make personalized Roman shades for you. This means you have an endless choice in the way your shades look. They are a cost effective way of treating windows and because of their unique design style, you can easily remove the fabric and replace it with a different design to