The Thinking That Goes Into Designing Curtain Poles

Umbra began life in 1979 when the founders, designers Paul Rowan and Les Mandelbaum, launched a single window shade. They realised that there was a need to design products for the modern age that would be accessible in both attitude and price.

Umbra is the Latin for "shade" and is based in Toronto in Canada, but today operates in 120 countries and has offices in Europe, the US, Brazil, and China as well. The team of international designers puts thought and creativity into the design of items that are in everyday use.

Take Umbra curtain poles for instance. Most of us don't give much though to our curtain poles, but many homes have them because we need them to hang our curtains from. Umbra have designed quite a number of curtain poles and they have made them out of a range of different materials. Of course, windows come in a lot of different widths, but the designers at Umbra have overcome that with a lot of their curtain poles because they have made some of them extendable.


The poles themselves are made out of a range of different materials such as nickel, pewter, walnut, and so on, and they come in a number of different colours. Of course, the curtain poles themselves are hidden from view a lot of the time when the curtains are drawn, but the pieces that you do notice are the end pieces, or finials, which do the job of preventing the curtain slipping off the ends of the poles. This is where Umbra's designers have gone to town, designing a range of different finials to suit every taste.

Then there is the fact that curtain poles have to be mounted in some way, so Umbra has different types of mounting brackets that can be screwed into the ends of the window frame or on the wall at the top of the window. Demonstrating originality, there is also a pair of mounting brackets that can be screwed into the ceiling above a window. In addition, there is the Coretto tension rod that fits into the inside of the window frame and needs no screwing or fixing at all as it is held in place by tension.

You can see how Umbra's designers put a lot of thought into what seem like mundane everyday items.

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