Like anything in decorating, there’s not a hard and fast rule for this, but most people agree that curtains look best when they’re hung high. It is higher and wider than the window itself. This not only creates the illusion of a bigger, grander window, but also makes your room feel taller and draws the eye up. This is a 9 inches room below, and you can see how nice it is for the window trim to get to breathe a little, and the eye goes from floor to almost-ceiling thanks to those long white curtains and that highly hung rod.

Speaking of the floor, most experts say that your curtains should usually touch or nearly touch the floor itself. This is all personal preference (some like them to hover slightly above the ground, others love a dramatic pool of fabric at the bottom) but we typically like them to graze the floor ever so slightly – like below in our showhouse’s dining room. We find this helps keep them in place better (when they don’t quite touch they tend to just hang randomly, but when they graze the ground they ground themselves and stay put if that makes sense).

Having them just touch and not be extra long and pooled makes them easier to move for vacuuming and ours don’t get all dragged around and gross on the bottom since they’re not excessively long (bonus: remember these curtains are 100% washable! In fact one of the first steps of getting them is to wash them to preshrink them so whenever you wash them again later, they don’t shrink on ya and the rod is still in the right place – more on that here).

But back to the curtain rod. The precise placement of yours depends on a few factors (ceiling height, curtain length, trim & molding style, etc) so I can’t give you a hard and fast measurement for where your rod should always go… but generally, we like to hang ours about 3-4″ below the ceiling or, if there’s crown molding, 3-4″ below the bottom edge of the crown.

Row of curtains hung in beach house dining room using dark bronze curtain rods.
capiz chandeliers | benches | chair | marble vase | stools | pendants | sconces
This allows the curtain rod to “reside” fully (including finials) within the painted area between the window and the ceiling, which always looks SO NICE. But the important thing to note is that we’re hanging them in relation to the ceiling, not the window. It’s the assumption that your curtains need to relate to the window that causes a lot of people to hang their curtains too low. Heck we have seen rods drilled right into the window trim itself, which is just another way to make things feel really squat and cramped.

Remember, trim looks so nice when it’s allowed to breathe without any rods looming over it or being drilled right into it. That being said – sometimes the window trim is really close to the crown, and in that case we like going into the wall above the trim if possible – since the crown or the trim might look tortured with a rod sticking out. This is another picture from the showhouse we designed a few years back to demonstrate what we mean:

Your best bet is to have someone hold half of the rod up with one curtain panel attached (after you’ve washed, ironed, and done whatever else might change the height of your panel – except for hemming, that should happen once they’re hung so you can get the perfect length). If you step back and view it while someone holds it up for you, you’ll be able to decide what looks best to your eye – and using that 3-4″ below the ceiling or crown molding guideline can help.


Of course there are super tall cathedral ceilings, or rooms where the ceiling height slopes, etc – so this guideline probably works best when the ceilings are 10′ or lower without much of a slope. All super tall rooms or spaces with sloped ceilings are special cases – but again, looking with your eyeballs as someone holds half a rod with a panel on it can really help you visualize what looks best.

HangZhou FengHao Aluminium co.,Ltd. is one of the China curtain rod supplier, welcome to your come and purchase!