Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Among the artisanal treasures on display at Villa Borsani, the resplendent family home conceived by the Italian Modernist Osvaldo Borsani, is a surprising standout – the net curtains. Located in a quiet suburb on the northern edges of Milan, and open during this year’s Alcova design showcase, the residence has a lofty living room with 4m windows hung with ethereal casement curtains as delicate as a spider’s web. Custom-created locally in Brianza when the house was completed during the 1940s, they cast exquisite shadows that dance across the geometric parquet floor.“They signify the special and the handcrafted, and gave a far richer effect than a flat panel of fabric on a window,” says Ambra Medda, who curated an exhibition at the villa in 2018. Known in Italian as tende a rete, net or voile curtains are enjoying a reappraisal in design circles. The 3 Days of Design fair in Copenhagen in June was awash with gauzy beauty. And in Sweden they are a tradition embraced. “Everyone I visit in Stockholm these days has net curtains. I love the simplicity of it,” says Tobias Vernon of the design gallery 8 Holland Street. “If you walk around the city streets at night, the houses glow from the inside out.” The nicest, most flattering thing is filtered lightUnlike heavy velvets or linens, sheers lend a sense of being screened, rather than being totally cut off from the outside world. They are nostalgic, but also playful. Fashion designer Giambattista Valli has printed Indian portraits on the voiles in the dressing room of his Paris apartment. And Rose Uniacke has employed the tapestry art of Simone Prouvé – known as the weaver of light – to shield the bathroom window in the renovated coach house of her Pimlico home. On the top floor at the 8 Holland Street Townhouse, in Bath, a sash window is dressed in a grid-like sheer in acerbic green from Kvadrat. “It’s a bit of a play on how naff nets were once considered,” says Vernon. “There’s definitely a reaction against their fusty, bad bungalow reputation. But they have come out the other side.” Stine Find Osther, VP of design at Kvadrat, agrees: “For decades net curtains were seen as super old fashioned and granny-ish. But they have begun to be used more freely again in recent years.” Osther sees transparent textiles as a kind of “soft architecture” that can help transform and effortlessly adapt a space. They are a way to introduce colour, and crucially, also soften hard, minimalist architecture. “People move into these big, minimalist rooms, which are beautiful but a little inhumane,” says Osther. Kvadrat’s Transparent Reflect textile is so crystalline, it’s barely perceptible. Yet even that creates a protective shield. “Too much free space behind you in a workspace can make you feel unsafe.”The right casement curtain has the power to uplift. Arne Aksel Jensen is dedicated to persuading his Scandinavian customers to shift their palettes beyond the beiges and greys. “I call it Scandi depression – and I want to fight that,” says the founder of Arne Aksel textiles. “There’s a spirituality to the colours that we bring into our homes. They affect you. Colour has the capacity to positively change us.” The brand’s most popular non-greige tones for sheers are now mint (suggestive of eternal spring), and a pale-pink shade called Blossom. In open-plan rooms, Jensen employs what he calls “sliding doors”, using a ceiling-hung curtain to divide a space. Perhaps the most dramatic yet effortlessly simple evocation of this approach (though all-white), is Shigeru Ban Architects’ Curtain Wall House. Completed in 1995, the apartment in Japan has exterior walls hung with airy fabrics inspired by traditional shoji screens and fusuma doors.“People are obsessed with the view and the light, but in fact the nicest most flattering thing is filtered light,” says London-based interior designer Joanna Plant, who frequently deploys Volga Linen’s voiles, particularly in south-facing rooms, as cafe curtains or sheer blinds. Pretty vintage panels of antique lace or linen, hung on a tension rod, can transform a window without even powering up a drill. Gemma Moulton’s company East London Cloth was born out of the demand for unfussy linen café curtains that arose during Covid. “During that time everyone wanted to work by a window and not be snooped on,” says Moulton, who favours a minimally gathered fabric treatment. Her CC Moulton fabric house creates woven linens mixed with silk in a mill close to where she grew up in Sudbury. “Too many flourishes detract from the nuance of the weave,” says Moulton. “A sheer fabric hung at a window allows one to really appreciate its beauty.” Our yearning for privacy is of course nothing new. In Europe, so-called under curtains evolved in the late 18th and early 19th century. Often featuring fringing and decoration, they protected lavish art and furniture from the sun’s glare. According to Danielle Patten, director of creative programmes and collections at the Museum of the Home in Hoxton, London, forms of sheer fabric have been used in upper-class homes for centuries. There wasn’t a need for privacy in country homes, but as people began shifting to cities, and with the introduction of Georgian architecture, with its grand sash windows, you began seeing terraced streets where people were looking straight into one another’s houses.“Ideas of privacy, respectability and moral propriety were really entwined in the Victorian period,” says Patten. “It would have been seen as very uncouth to see straight into someone’s home.” Nets only became tainted by association after the second world war. “There was a snobbiness around suburbia. Nets were suddenly seen as really unfashionable, and associated with nosy neighbours. Stereotypes of curtain twitchers started to come through.” But, as Jensen observes, there’s often a double standard at work. “When you’re inside looking out, they’re nosy neighbours; but when you’re outside looking in – you’re curious and interested.” Let the twitching commence.
