Back in the before times (i.e. February 2020) I was approached by Studio Weave with a brief to design and manufacture a set of acoustic dampening curtains for the new office space of arts charity A New Direction.

The Brief

A New Direction’s new Central London office had a serious sound transfer issue, thanks in part to exposed utilities on the ceiling and a large void connecting the upper and lower floors. The upper floor had been designated as a space to hold workshops for the young people that they work with, whilst the lower floor was the main office space for the team. After a few trials they found it wasn’t possible to have both groups of people working harmoniously together at the same time, and approached Studio Weave to come up with a solution to their sound issues as well as an office renovation.

The initial brief was simple, visit the space, run a co-design workshop with the end users and manufacture the curtains in a 6 week window (!). However we all know what happened next, and over the course of the next eight months we slowly pieced together how the space would be used, worked around factory closured and eventually installed in December 2020.*

Inhale Week One

My initial site visit was cancelled and all meetings moved to zoom, I did’t actually see the space I was designing for until September 2020, which now feels wild but it’s amazing what you can do when you have to! We kept the co-design element in the brief but it became more holistic, a way to offer the staff who were isolated at home a moment to connect and envisage the future of the office that they would eventually go back to. We worked the project on an inhale/exhale rotation, for four weeks we alternated between me providing information and then active engagement from the team.

I began the discussion by delving into the value of the textiles in our lives, focusing on the element of the brief that wanted the curtains to make the space feel welcoming to the young people who would use it. As we were stuck at home it felt appropriate to delve into what made our homes feel like ‘home’.

“We live surrounded by cloth. We are swaddled in it at birth and shrouds are drawn over our faces in death. We sleep enclosed by layer upon layer of it – like the pea that woke the princess in the fairytale – and, when we wake, we clothe ourselves in yet more of it to face the world and let it know who we shall be that day.”

I then asked the team to bring an object which felt like home to the next online session, we broke out into discussion groups and started to look at the objects as well as thinking about colour and form. This discussion led to one clear thing that made people feel at home - music.

Inhale Week Three: Music and the Home

The repeated references to music led me to the next inhale theme - synesthesia, the blurring of senses and the visualisation of sound. I used Kandinsky as a key reference as well as the work of textile designer studio Beat Woven, who create textiles from sound.

In response to this information I ran a still life drawing class over zoom and created a desert island disc playlist of everyone’s ‘save from the waves’ track for them to listen to whilst drawing. The responses were incredibly varied with some drawing the sounds they were hearing and others with more literal translations. These drawings were to form the basis of my design work and were eventually translated to the final curtains.

Material Choices

These curtains have to work hard. They need to create a room, dampen sound and let light in. That’s a lot of work for one set of curtains, and with the budget available we were not in a position to use some of the more high tech acoustic materials on the market.

So we went with the material guaranteed to work - wool! I love wool, it is incredibly versatile and durable but also very opaque. This element really missed a core part of the brief which was to allow light into the space when the curtains were closed so I sourced a graphic mesh cloth from Kvadrat to make up one of the central panels. It would compromise the acoustic integrity of the curtains but with the volume of cloth we were working with I was confident that we would achieve balance.

Manufacturing in a Pandemic

Is challenging and rewarding! The manufacturing was done by a social enterprise called Fashion Enter, and they did a fantastic job. These were the first curtains they had ever made and they were certainly not easy. Made up of multi-coloured patchwork panels, each one a different size and material, it was a logistical and admin nightmare but we got there! The curtains had to be double sided and because of the grid fabric we were unable to line them so we created flat-felled seams on the vertical joins and bound the horizontal edges to make a set of curtains which can be happily viewed from both sides.

And Finally

There we are, a tale of many layers. I loved taking patchwork out of the domestic and into a commercial space, challenging our notions of how textiles can be used in our office spaces. The co-design element of this project was incredibly rewarding at a time when we were all so separated, and it was fascinating for me as a designer to jump off from a totally surprising and random starting point provided by someone else’s drawing.

The Facts

Budget: £12k

Timeframe: 8 months (should have been 8 weeks)

Client: A New Direction

Architects: Studio Weave

Metres of fabric: 93

*Why the late blog post I hear you ask? Well I have been holding off, waiting for an opportunity to properly photograph the space, however due to the ongoing pandemic A New Direction are still not working from their beautiful new office so I have been unable to have it photographed. Rather than wait another year, I have decided to share now and hopefully update the images at some point in the future!