Meet Mara Levin, Editorial Lead of Two Pages Curtains

Readers land on an author page for three reasons, and they are almost never the same. Some want a name to trust before they spend $600 on custom drapery. Some want the method behind a review that says a 140 gsm linen will outlast an 85 gsm sheer by five years. And some just want to know whether the person recommending a $300 blackout panel has ever thought seriously about linings.

This page answers all three. The editor is Mara Levin, formerly on the trade side of European flax mills, now the editorial lead of Two Pages Curtains Guide and the voice behind its linen coverage. What follows is the background, the method, the taste, and the money, laid out in the same order a careful reader would ask.

Meet the Editor

What’s your background, Mara?

Mara spent six years on the trade side of European flax mills, writing spec sheets for interior architecture firms that were ordering Belgian-blend linen by the roll. Those spec sheets had to explain, in language a spec-writer could bill against, why a 170 gsm weave hung differently than a 115 gsm one across the same 108-inch drop. That is where the drape-first lens started.

Before starting the mission behind Two Pages Curtains, Mara had already written enough European Flax certified linen spec sheets to know which mills cut corners on the finishing wash. That is not something a magazine writer picks up. It shows up in every review here.

The pivot from trade to consumer writing was not a career reset. It was the same job on the other side of the invoice. Mara started publishing under her own byline in 2024, and Two Pages Curtains Guide is the consolidated home of that work.

Why curtains, of all things?

Curtains are the only surface in a room that has to work as engineering and mood at the same time. A rug covers a floor. A paint color covers a wall. A curtain has to hang, block, filter, drape, and read as a room decision, all at once, in a panel the light passes through twice a day.

That double duty is what makes them worth writing about. The trade-offs are legible: weight versus drape, weave versus light, header versus stack. Nothing gets hidden behind a finish. If a 90 gsm sheer is hung over a south-facing window in summer, Mara will say it plainly: the panel will not survive year two.

The obsession is the math. GSM, shading percentage, header stack ratio, lining transmission rate. Those numbers do the honest talking in every review.

Who else is on the Two Pages Curtains desk?

Five editors, one shared rubric. Mara leads the desk and owns the linen coverage. Theo Castellan takes velvet, silk, and the heavyweight textures. Owen Reyes covers shades and blinds, from cordless mechanics to motor protocols. Iris Quinn writes the outdoor and cafe curtain coverage, and Nora Vance tracks the designer collaborations. Every byline traces back to one of the five, and each editor has a full bio on their author page.

The reader base splits three ways, and the writing shifts a little for each. First-time renters look for panels that will not embarrass them at year one. Owners want the five-year investment call. Luxury buyers want to know what a Belgian mill actually ships versus what a marketing page claims.

How do you actually review a collection?

The framework is five axes: drape, light control, build, value, service. Each axis has a defined range and a weighting, and a collection gets rated against the whole Two Pages catalog on the same scale. A 4.6/5 on drape means the panel is in the top decile of what the mill ships, not “we liked it.”

The methodology page has the full scoring rubric. What matters here is what the reviews do not claim: no one from the desk climbs on a ladder to hang a rod, no one steams a panel over the kitchen island, no one photographs their own living room and calls it a test. That is a boundary Mara draws on purpose.

Instead, the workflow is swatch-first. Every collection covered starts with the free swatch set from Two Pages, cross-checked against the mill spec sheet, then triangulated against verified buyer photos from Judge.me. When a review says a color reads warmer in person, it is because the swatch is on the desk, not because a photo suggested it.

Axis	Range	What it captures	Weight
Drape	1.0 – 5.0	GSM, weave, header stack, break at hem	25%
Light control	1.0 – 5.0	Shading %, lining transmission, room fit	20%
Build	1.0 – 5.0	Stitching, hem weight, header craftsmanship	20%
Value	1.0 – 5.0	Price-per-panel vs comparable spec elsewhere	20%
Service	1.0 – 5.0	Lead time, swatch program, returns, support	15%

What’s your taste, in one sentence?

Warm neutrals, drape-first, structured headers. Sand, oat, honey, pale flax, with one accent of charcoal or moss in a room to keep it from reading too soft. The reason it works: every color in that family reads well against the Belgian flax undertone the best linen mills ship.

The 2026 palette map is six shades wide. It shows up in the review picks, the mood boards, and the sample sets Mara pulls when building a comparison piece. If a color is not on this strip, it is probably not going to get a hero placement.

What red flags kill a curtain for you?

Four flags, in order. First: anything under 100 gsm sold as blackout. The physics do not work, the review will say so. Second: grommet-only headers with no pinch pleat or ripple fold alternative, because grommet stack looks fine in a photo and sags in year two.

Third: no lining choices. A collection that ships one lining option is a collection that has never talked to a real interior architect. Fourth: lead time over eight weeks with no update system. Custom curtains take time, that is fair, but a brand that cannot tell a buyer where their panel is in production has skipped the service axis entirely.

Those four flags show up in the reviews the same way, every time. If a collection trips any of them, the verdict names it.

Affiliate money, how is that handled?

Two Pages is the only brand covered in depth on this site, and every product link is an affiliate link. That is disclosed on every page, and every affiliate link carries the rel="nofollow sponsored" attribute. The site earns a commission when a reader configures a panel after clicking through.

The line Mara holds: no product goes on this site that she would not order from personally. When a collection underdelivers, the review says so, and the affiliate link still points there, because a low score is more useful to a reader than a hidden product.

Where should a reader start?

Three entry points, depending on why you are here. If the goal is orientation, the Linen Curtains Hub is the pillar page: it lays out every collection Two Pages sells against use case, weight, and header. If the goal is a single reference review, the Liz Linen Drape Pleated piece is the panel most of the site’s comparisons pivot on.

And if the goal is the physical experience of custom drapery for the first time, the answer is free swatches. Mara’s rule: do not configure a $600 panel from a laptop screen. Order the swatches, hold them against the wall for two days, then decide.

Follow the Byline

Every review, comparison, and buying guide on this site carries one of five bylines, and the scoring stays consistent because the rubric is shared across the whole desk. The goal is simple: a reader should be able to look at a curtain recommendation on Two Pages Curtains Guide and know exactly who is on the hook for it, and what they know about linen weave, grommet stack, and lining transmission before they wrote it down.