Surrey Manor House

The Project

A private family home in a Grade II listed manor house near the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The property had been sympathetically restored over several years and the owners wanted window treatments that would honour the architecture while bringing warmth and comfort to rooms that can be draughty and cold in winter.

We worked with the client’s interior designer over three months to develop the specification for twelve principal rooms: the drawing room, dining room, library, morning room, study, master bedroom and five further bedrooms, plus the principal landing and hall. Each room required a different solution that coordinated with its particular architectural character and use.

The Specification

The drawing room and dining room received floor-to-ceiling handmade curtains with interlined and blackout linings, hung on silent glide tracks concealed behind deep upholstered pelmets. The heading style is a triple-pleat throughout the formal rooms — appropriate to the period of the house — with pole-to-floor drop of up to 3.8 metres in the drawing room where the original sash windows run full height. All fabrics in these rooms are sourced from Colefax & Fowler, Zoffany and Romo, chosen by the interior designer and made up by us to her specification.

The bedrooms use a consistent but lighter specification: blackout-lined Roman blinds within the reveals for functional light control, with curtain poles and pinch-pleat curtains in front for warmth and aesthetics. Battery-powered motorised blinds are used throughout the bedrooms, allowing operation from the bed without cabling through listed fabric walls.

The Making Process

All curtains were made in our workroom to our own quality standard. Interlined curtains of this scale — some drops approaching 4 metres — require particular care in cutting and making to ensure the fabric hangs true without distortion. Weights are hand-sewn into each seam and hem. Heading tapes are hand-gathered and individually adjusted before hanging. The pelmets were built on-site by our joiner and upholstered in our workroom.

Installation was carried out over four days by our installation team. The height of several windows required specialist access equipment, which we sourced and managed. All work was completed to the satisfaction of the interior designer, who signed off the project on completion.