Where a curtain is hung matters more than what it is made of. The single most common window mistake, in Dubai and everywhere, is a curtain hung at the top of the window frame and stopping at its edges, which makes the window look smaller, the ceiling lower, and the fabric meaner than it is. Hung correctly, near the ceiling and extended well past the frame on both sides, the same curtain adds height, makes the window look larger, softens the light, and quiets the room. The rule is simple: high and wide.
The short version is that curtains do three jobs in a Dubai apartment, and all three depend on hanging them properly. They soften the strong, constant daylight and the glare off glass and marble. They add the vertical softness a hard-shelled apartment lacks. And they absorb sound in a room full of reflective surfaces. A curtain hung high and wide does all three; a curtain hung tight to the frame does none of them well and shrinks the window as a bonus.
High
Hang the curtain rod close to the ceiling, not at the top of the window. The eye follows the fabric up, reads the height as the room's height, and the window appears to extend the whole way, which makes both the window and the ceiling feel taller. A rod fixed just above the window frame does the reverse: it draws a hard horizontal line partway up the wall, caps the window there, and lowers the apparent ceiling.
The guideline is to fix the rod roughly two thirds to three quarters of the way up the gap between the window frame and the ceiling, or right at the ceiling for the strongest effect, and to have the curtains long enough to just touch or barely break on the floor. Curtains that stop above the floor, hovering at the windowsill or halfway down the wall, are the clearest sign of a window done wrong, and they make even good fabric look like an afterthought. Full length, from near the ceiling to the floor, is the whole effect.
Wide
Extend the rod well past the window on both sides, so that when the curtains are open they stack against the wall beside the glass rather than covering it. This does two things. It lets the whole window show and the maximum daylight in when the curtains are open, which matters in an apartment you want bright by day. And it makes the window look significantly wider than it is, because the eye reads the full span of fabric as the width of the opening.
A rod cut to the exact width of the window forces the open curtains to bunch over the glass, blocking light and framing the window as narrow. Extended 20 to 30 centimetres past the frame on each side, the same curtains clear the glass entirely when open and imply a window half again as wide. High and wide work together: the first adds height, the second adds width, and between them a modest developer window reads as generous.
The fabric, and the fullness
Once the position is right, the fabric matters, and the main thing about fabric is that there should be enough of it. A curtain needs fullness, roughly twice the width of the space it covers in fabric, so that even when closed it falls in full soft folds rather than stretching flat and thin across the window. A flat, skimpy curtain reads as cheap regardless of the cloth; a full one reads as generous even in a simple fabric, because the eye reads the volume of the folds.
For Dubai, a heavier cloth in a warm neutral does the most work: it softens the strong light, adds real weight and softness to a hard room, and holds its folds. A sheer layer behind it, on a second track, diffuses the daylight without blocking it, so the room can be bright and soft at once during the day and fully softened at night. The combination, a full heavy curtain and a sheer, both hung high and wide, is the standard answer to a Dubai window and it works.
Why it is worth doing right
Curtains are one of the highest-return, lowest-disruption changes in an apartment, and getting them wrong wastes most of that return. The fabric is often the largest soft-material purchase in a room, and hanging it tight to the frame throws away the height, the width, the light control, and the softening it could have delivered, leaving an expensive curtain doing a fraction of its job. The cost of hanging it high and wide instead is a longer rod and a taller fix, almost nothing, for most of the effect.
In a hard, bright, hard-shelled Dubai apartment, curtains hung properly are close to the best single move after the lighting: they add height, soften the glare, quiet the room, and make the windows generous, all at once. Hang them high, hang them wide, and give them enough fabric to fall full. The rule is short and the difference is large.