Where do you even start?
Most people come to fabric with a room in their head and no way of turning it into a shortlist. There are a lot of fabrics, they all look reasonable on a screen, and none of the differences that matter are visible until the fabric is hanging in front of a window.
So the useful thing is not a tour of every fabric type. It is a short order of decisions that cuts the choice down: what the room is doing, how heavy you want the curtain to look, what the colour has to live with, and whether a pattern will read at window size. Samples settle the rest.
Start with the room, not the fabric
Before you look at anything, decide what the curtains are for in that particular room. A sitting room curtain is usually there to soften a hard rectangle of glass and to close the room down in the evening. A bedroom curtain is doing a job about light and privacy.
That decision narrows the weight before you ever pick a colour. It also tells you whether the fabric needs to work with a lining, which is a separate choice and worth reading about in the guide to choosing curtain linings before you commit to a fabric.
Then look at what is already in the room. Fabric is the largest single area of pattern or colour you will add, so it has to sit alongside the flooring, the walls and the furniture rather than compete with them.
Weight and weave decide how it hangs
The single biggest visual difference between two fabrics is not colour. It is how the fabric falls. A heavier cloth breaks into deeper, slower folds and holds a vertical line down to the floor. A lighter cloth makes shallower, more frequent folds and moves more.
Weave changes this too. A closely woven cloth tends to fold cleanly and hold its shape. A looser, more open weave falls softly and reads as more relaxed. Neither is better, but they produce genuinely different curtains from the same window.
A useful test on a sample is to gather a handful of it in your fist and let it drop. Watch how it recovers. Fabric that springs back into loose folds behaves very differently on a pole from fabric that hangs where you put it.
Weight also has consequences for the hardware, because a heavy curtain over a wide window puts real load on the fixings. If you are leaning heavy, the article on hanging heavy curtains covers what the pole and brackets have to do.
Colour looks different in your room
Two things change a colour once it is on your wall. The first is the light the room gets. A north-facing room takes a cooler, more even light all day, which pushes greys and blues colder and can flatten a warm neutral into something dull. A south-facing room gets warmer, stronger light that lifts creams and yellows and can bleach out a pale colour completely in the middle of the day.
The second is everything else in the room. A beige that looked neutral in isolation turns pink next to a grey floor, or yellow next to a white wall. Colour is always relative.
Which is why the honest advice is this: the colour you see on a screen is not reliable. Screens vary, photographs are lit for photography, and no two monitors render the same file the same way. A fabric that looks soft green online can arrive noticeably more blue. This is not a fault in the fabric or the photograph. It is what screens do.
The only way to judge a colour is to see the actual fabric in the actual room, at more than one time of day. Hold it up at the window, then take it to the darkest corner. If it still works in both, it will work.
Pattern has to read at window size
A pattern on a small sample and the same pattern on a made-up curtain are two different experiences. Curtains are gathered, so a proportion of the width disappears into the folds, and what you actually see is the pattern broken up over vertical pleats rather than laid out flat.
Large-scale patterns often survive this better than small ones. A big, open design keeps its shape even when part of it is hidden in a fold. A busy small-scale print can turn into texture, or into visual noise, once it is gathered.
Scale is also about the window. A pattern that looks generous on a wide window can look cropped at random on a narrow one, because you only see part of the repeat.
If you are drawn to a pattern, hold the sample up and gather it in your hand rather than looking at it flat. That gets you closer to what you will actually see. Browsing the curtain fabrics collection gives you a sense of scale across a range before you narrow down.
What the fabric has to work with
A fabric is never chosen on its own. It has to work with a heading, a lining and a pole or track, and those choices push back on each other.
The heading matters because it determines how the fabric is gathered. A crisp pleated heading asks a lot of a fabric that will not hold a fold, and a very heavy cloth can look bulky in a heading designed for something lighter. The curtain headings guide explains what each heading does to the top of the curtain.
Lining changes the handle and the weight of the finished curtain, and it changes how the fabric reads from the room, particularly with paler and more open cloths.
If you have practical requirements in mind, a curtain going into a kitchen or a child's room for instance, read the fabric's own product page. The composition and care information is published there for every cloth, and it is a better guide than the look of a sample. As a general rule, lined and interlined curtains are dry clean only, because the layers behave differently to water.
Get a sample into the room
Everything above narrows the shortlist. It does not finish the job. The choice is properly made when you have two or three pieces of real fabric to compare against your own walls and floor.
Live with them for a few days. Look at them in the morning and after dark with the lights on. Put them next to the sofa. Most shortlists sort themselves out within a week, and it is common for the fabric you were sure about online to lose to one you added as an afterthought.
Samples are free, you can have up to eight at a time, and UK postage is free as well. There is no separate sample form: list the fabrics you want on the contact form, or raise them when you book the free design consultation, and they go out within a few working days. Pole and track finish samples can be requested the same way, which is worth doing if you are choosing hardware and fabric together.
Where to go next
When you have a direction, the fabrics overview sets out what is available and how the ranges differ. If you would rather work it through with someone who can look at the room with you, the free design consultation is the sensible route, particularly where the window is awkward or the fabric is doing a lot of work in the scheme.