Industry
Office Buildings
Curtain-wall towers and fitted-out floors where screen glare, a building-wide external appearance rule and after-hours access govern the specification as much as the fabric does.
On an office floor the brief is almost always glare on monitors, not darkness. We measure illuminance at desk height rather than at the glass, because the number that matters is what lands on the screen. For a floor of open-plan desks the answer is usually a 3% openness sunscreen in charcoal: dark yarn gives the best outward clarity and the least veiling reflection, where a light fabric bounces light back into the room and reads hazy. We mock up one bay and let the occupants sit with it for a day before the floor is ordered.
Curtain walls dictate how the blind is fixed. Building management will not allow fixings into the glazing frame or through structural silicone, and doing it voids the façade warranty, so brackets go to the slab edge, the ceiling bulkhead or a timber sub-frame we supply. Mullion centres then set the widths: a 1500 mm module means blinds of 1500 mm, not one 4500 mm blind, so a damaged unit is replaced without touching its neighbours.
Most towers also enforce a uniform external appearance. The fabric reverse facing the street has to be the same colour on every floor, which means one backing colour is fixed for the whole building even when tenants choose different room-side finishes. We check the tenant handbook for that clause before quoting, because discovering it after production is a remake at our cost.
Access is the schedule driver. Fit-out work in an occupied tower is typically restricted to 6 pm to 6 am with a gate pass, a comprehensive general liability certificate and a named crew list lodged in advance. We install by floor overnight so no desk loses a working day, and we hold spare fabric from the same dye lot for two years so a tenant reconfiguration in year two does not arrive as a visibly different grey.