Porterville Living Room — Embellished Cornice Boxes, Sheers & Lined Drapery

A grand Central Valley residence in Porterville with two-story living room windows, ornate gilded crown molding, and a marble floor. The windows were architecturally awkward — extremely tall, oddly proportioned at the heads, and competing with heavy ceiling ornament. The client wanted a treatment formal enough to live with crystal chandeliers and gold leaf detailing: sheers for daytime softness, embellished cornice boxes to crown the windows and resolve their awkward shapes, and full-length lined drapery panels weighted to drape properly from the towering rod height.

A three-element program per window. Sheers first — patterned for daytime privacy without losing light. Floor-length over-drapery in a warm taupe, fully lined and interlined so the panels read substantial and break cleanly at the marble floor. Crowning everything: a custom shaped cornice box upholstered in a tone-on-tone damask, scalloped and finished with a continuous crystal-bead trim and a center jewel medallion, sized to mask the awkward window heads and tie back to the gilded ceiling molding. Scaffolding was erected on the marble floor on a floor-safe system rated for stone — load-distributing base plates and felt pads, never bare steel on marble — so the team could install the cornices at full ceiling height safely.

Sheers: patterned linen-blend voile. Over-drapery: warm-taupe drapery weight, fully lined and interlined for weighted drape. Cornice boxes: tone-on-tone woven damask with continuous crystal-bead trim and a center medallion.

Hand-built wood cornice frames, fabric-wrapped and trimmed on-site; concealed traverse rods behind the cornice; over-drapery on heavy-duty traverse hardware sized for two-story drops.

Marble-safe scaffolding system erected in the living room — load-distributing base plates and felt isolation pads under every leg, no direct steel-to-stone contact at any point. Two installers worked the cornice run while a third spotted and staged sections from below; the cornice was lifted in plastic-wrapped sections to protect the gilded molding, set, then hand-tacked at height and trimmed in place. Sheers hung first, over-drapery dressed and steam-trained last so the panels broke evenly at the marble.

The awkward window heads disappear behind the shaped, jeweled cornices, which now read as part of the ceiling ornament rather than separate hardware. The lined-and-interlined drapery falls with real weight and frames the view to the pool beyond. The marble floor was left untouched — no scratching, no point loading, no residue — proving the studio's scaffolding protocol on stone floors. Porterville and the surrounding Central Valley (Bakersfield, Visalia, Tulare, Hanford) are an active service area for the studio.