Curtains for our new house
28 Dec 2025 | #housing | #japan | #techWe just finished building our house in Tokyo with Ichijo and had the handover at the end of October. One thing we had to get from a different company were the curtains.
Ichijo only does honeycomb shades
Ichijo doesn’t handle curtains, they only do honeycomb shades. They offer these in 3 levels (completely dark, medium, and lace) and in manual or electric versions. We got these for most of our windows in completely dark versions for the bedrooms, and in middle for the living room. We chose the electric versions everywhere.
It is possible to add up to 2 honeycomb shades per window, but we only added one.
The term honeycomb shade is a trademark of Hunter Douglas and Ichijo is licensing the technology and making it themselves (per some Japanese forums and our Ichijo contact). The remotes use radio (presumably 314.84 MHz), and I’m in the process of figuring out how to send the signals (but this guy found a way with Arduino/ESP8266, so should be possible).
However we also wanted to add some regular curtains: lace curtains to the bedroom windows and the balcony door in the living room. And we also had some roll curtain ideas for some of the storage space.
Ichijo’s answer was: talk to our friends at Jias.
Jias, the curtain company
We visited the Jias showroom in Shibuya, and they were very helpful. We could pick out all the curtain rails, lace curtains and roll curtains that we wanted, and they gave us really good advice. They also told us that they will coordinate with Ichijo and have everything installed by the time we get the keys to the house. This indeed happened, which was really nice, as it was one less thing to worry about.
We got rails like this (double in case we want to add two sets of curtains):
And this is the balcony door lace curtain that we chose (we got the same type for the bedroom windows too):
For the pantry and the storage at the genkan, we got these manual roll curtains:
Jias provided premium service, which was also reflected in their prices. Overall we paid the following:
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Balcony door lace curtain | ¥27,400 |
| Bedroom lace curtains (3 pieces) | ¥45,400 |
| Roll curtains (2 pieces) | ¥45,400 |
| Curtain rails, double (5 pieces) | ¥30,800 |
| Installation cost | ¥19,800 |
| Misc expenses | ¥5,200 |
| Overall | ¥174,000 |
(We only got curtains for 4 windows but added 5 rails as one of the future bedrooms is currently used as storage.)
The price included an Ichijo-partner discount of 32%, so their list price would have been 1.5 times more. We actually didn’t get all the lace curtains initially, as we had some left-over curtains from previous apartments, and only after moving in did we realize that we wanted more. So we ordered the bedroom lace curtains later, but Jias let us still use the Ichijo discount.
We could have bought and installed the curtain rails ourselves, and then get curtains from somewhere like Nitori. Custom size curtains are still expensive, but it would have been definitely less than Jias. On the other hand Jias gave us great advice, and having the rails installed before we moved in was very helpful as it meant one less thing to worry about. Also good quality curtains can last a long time, so getting something higher quality can be cheaper in the end. Overall I’m happy that we went with them, and I would do it again.