Production Stories: Salt PR curtain
Today is a production story that took us well outside of our comfort zone! Salt PR commissioned an all white linen curtain for their new studio space in Shoreditch. The brief was to create a curtain in a single colour and material palette inspired by Korean Bojagi patchwork processes, which would divide the public and private workspaces within the office.
We took inspiration from the geometry and architecture of the space to create a series of design routes. Focusing on the crittal windows and strong columns in the studio, we developed a series of building blocks to create a tetris-like series of designs.
Minimal waste and sustainability were also at the heart of this project, with the curtain constructed from deadstock linen and an ambition to create a zero-waste design. Once the building blocks of the design were in place, we set about ensuring that they could all be cut from the cloth in the most efficient way possible, tweaking sizes until we had a cutting plan that ensured less than 2% of the cloth was left at the end of the manufacturing process. The remaining fabric will be used on future studio projects, and the very smallest scraps will become part of our ongoing experimentations with cloth-fibre paper.
The curtain was created in the studio over four days, where we slowly built up the patchwork blocks with flat-felled seams to form a textile drawing that reflected the architecture of the studio. Designed to hang on a Silent Gliss wave track, we reduced the standard 80mm wave to something closer to a 40mm wave by shifting the hook distribution on the tape. This small change means that the finished curtain has a softer drape than the traditional 80mm wave, but maintains an architectural sharpness that can’t be achieved with any other curtain finish.
Below are some images of the initial design concepts, followed by the production images of the curtain in progress in the studio.
Below are some images of the curtain in progress, looking rather crumpled (the joys of linen)
