At Sarah Wooldridge Design, we work on many client projects, from one-room refurbishments to full-scale renovations. We cover a broad area around the Thames Valley, including Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hampshire and London. With this in mind, we wanted to share more about what goes on behind the scenes and how we work with our clients, with our Sonning client case study.
The client approached us in spring 2023 with a brief to provide the window dressings for their main bedroom. The project was in a period Georgian property, as you can see from the images and like all houses of its time, the walls are not symmetrical. With period properties, sometimes things do not go smoothly.
Project 1: The Main Bedroom
The client had brought the Georgian house a while ago but had only just started to work on the internal renovations when we started to speak with them about their main bedroom curtains. The bedroom was going to be fitted with built in furniture and our client wanted some luxurious curtains to go with it. The room was big and ran the full width of the house, with one window facing the front and another to the rear, overlooking the garden. When you stood in the middle of the room you could just about see both sets of curtains.
Our Head Designer, Sarah was brought in at the beginning of the project. She was able guide where needed and work with the client to choose the fabric first, then the wall paint could be chosen to match. This is an easier way of working rather than painting the walls and trying to find fabric later.
We always recommend investing in window dressings in two key places in your home – your living/ dining room, where you entertain and spend a lot of leisure time and your main bedroom. You want your main bedroom to feel like it gives you a hug every night.
As you would expect from a Georgian property, the rooms were big and the house had very large high windows. When we first visited our clients had not yet started any of the renovation work, so there was no decoration or design in place.
Working from the built in furniture plans Sarah could work out what kind of window dressing would complement them. Because it was such a large room, when Sarah started measuring the curtains, she realised they measured quite differently, even though they looked the same. They windows were not symmetrical, but they had to be made to look symmetrical, otherwise it would be really noticeable against the furniture.
When we started to consider fabric, the client was clear she wanted a colourful embroidered fabric. We work with different fabric houses day in, day out. so with Sarah’s expertise she was quickly able to show her a number of different fabric options across a range of budgets. The options included this beautiful – “Richmond Fabric – Raspberry & Duck egg” from Clarke & Clarke, which she loved.
The final challenge we faced with this part of the project was with the hardware. Because the walls, floor level and ceiling were all uneven we could not use standard brackets. With this in mind, we had to use adjustable brackets that worked with the age of the building. We completed the project in June 2023 and the end result was striking.
Project 2: The Dining Room
Once we had completed the main bedroom project the client invited us back to help with the window dressings for their dining room. As before it was brilliant to be involved in the renovation planning stage of the project. The dining room had two big windows which again were at completely different heights, we discovered that the floor was level, but the ceiling was not.
We encountered a similar challenge to the bedroom project with unsymmetrical walls, but we also had an additional challenge with the radiators. The client had already installed old fashioned pillar radiators in front of the windows, they were very deep, so it was not possible to the draw curtains in front of them.
Working collaboratively with the client, we explained the situation, together we agreed that the solution was to install working Roman blinds and dressed curtains either side of the windows. This was a challenge because the client was not so keen on the Roman blinds. We managed to match the colour of the blinds exactly to the wall paint, which meant they essentially disappeared to the eye and worked out well in the end.
The client had a beautiful piece of art with a strong turquoise colour in the living room. Whilst it is not in the photographs we chose the Romo Wisteria Embroidery Peacock fabric which has a heavy embroidered pattern to compliment it
Because the windows were at different heights, it was important the fabric pattern worked across both windows. Usually you would match the fabric at the top to make the pattern line up. Because of the completely different heights of the windows, where two houses had been knocked through to make one big house, we had to match from the bottom. When completing the final measurements our Head Designer Sarah noted the ceiling heights were a staggering 25 cm different. One curtain was 250cm in length and the other 227 cm.
The Outcome
The final look for both of these projects was stunning. The client was really happy, with our work from the initial project in June 2023, so invited us back to work on the dining room window dressings in October 2023. It was great to be involved from the beginning of both projects so we could help the client to pull everything together. It was lovely to receive these kind words from the client:
“Sarah, we have enjoyed working with you and thank you for your guidance as we made decisions. We certainly ended up with fabrics we are truly delighted with.”
If you would like some help brining your window dressing project to life, please get in touch, we would be delighted to help.
