Defining the Brief

The first three chapters of Volume I produce information. The brief is where that information becomes a working document. It is a short, disciplined record — usually two to four pages per room — that names the project, describes the architecture, lists the functional requirements, and sets the parameters within which the specification will be written. Nothing in the brief is fabric, a finish, or a price. The brief precedes those decisions and governs them.

Our studio writes a brief for every project, including projects that appear simple on first reading. A single pair of panels in a primary bedroom deserves a brief for the same reason a forty-window hospitality program does: the brief is what we hold ourselves to a year later when the client asks why a decision was made.

What the brief contains

A House of Drapery brief is organized around the room, not the window. Each room has its own brief, even when the rooms share a client, an architect, and a design language. The structure is consistent enough that returning clients recognize it and varied enough that the document reflects the actual project.

1. The room in plain language

Two or three sentences describing the room: where it is in the house, how the client uses it, what the brief is asked to solve. “Primary bedroom, east-facing, second floor, Beverly Hills traditional. Client requests reliable blackout to 7:00 a.m. in summer without losing the existing crown detail or the view of the rear garden during the day.” Anyone reading the brief three years later should understand the project from this paragraph alone.

2. Architectural conditions

The relevant findings from the walk-through, edited to what governs the specification: ceiling height, casing type and depth, available wall return on each side of each opening, crown or soffit conditions, wall substrate and anchorage strategy, floor type and the resulting decision about hem break, and any asymmetry or obstruction that affects how the drapery can be mounted. We include verified measurements here, not estimated ones.

3. Functional requirements

What the drapery must do, in order of priority. This is the most important section of the brief. “Blackout to 7:00 a.m. in June. Privacy from the neighboring property to the east at all hours. Daytime view preservation across the garden. Single-touch operation from the bed.” Functions are written as commitments, not as preferences, because everything downstream is judged against them.

4. Lifestyle profile

The relevant material from Chapter I.3, condensed: how the room is used and by whom, the maintenance posture, the entertaining or media demands, the presence of children, pets, or art that affects fabric and lining decisions. We do not write this section to be exhaustive; we write it to be useful when fabric and lining choices are made.

5. Design language and adjacencies

How the room relates to the rest of the house and to the client’s broader sensibility: the design language of the adjacent rooms, the palette of the architecture and furnishings, the reference images the client has shared, and the rooms whose drapery this brief must sit alongside. If the client is working with an interior designer or architect, their design intent is captured here in the language they use, not translated into ours.

6. Parameters and explicit exclusions

What is in scope and what is not. Which rooms are being designed now and which are deferred. Whether motorization is committed, optional, or excluded. Whether existing hardware is being reused or replaced. Whether the project is being phased and, if so, what each phase contains. A clear exclusion early prevents a difficult conversation later.

7. Open questions

What our designer still needs to verify before specifying. A wall anchor that requires opening before fabrication. A ceiling flatness measurement scheduled for the next visit. A confirmation from the architect about a beam location. A blackout sample to be tested in the room at sunrise. These are written down so they are not forgotten and so the client understands what remains before the specification can be finalized.

How the brief is reviewed

The brief is shared with the client, and where relevant with the interior designer or architect, before any specification work begins. We ask them to read it carefully and tell us what is wrong, missing, or imprecise. Almost every brief receives at least one correction at this stage — a use case we did not surface, a sensitivity we did not weight correctly, a piece of architecture we recorded inexactly. We would rather change a sentence in the brief than a fabrication later.

When the brief has been corrected and confirmed, it is signed off informally — usually by email — and it becomes the document the specification answers to. Every later decision in Volumes II through VII references the brief explicitly: a heading is chosen because the brief requires a particular operation; a lining is specified because the brief requires a particular blackout performance; a hardware finish is selected because the brief describes a particular adjacent palette. The brief is the answer-key.

When the brief is amended

Projects evolve. A client adds a room. An architect changes a window. A new exposure becomes a concern after the first summer. When the project changes, the brief is amended in writing rather than adjusted in conversation. An amendment carries the same weight as the original brief and is reviewed the same way. We keep the original on record so that the reasoning behind the first decisions remains legible to anyone who joins the project later — including our own studio, years on.

What the brief makes possible

With a defined brief, the work of Volume II begins. The architecture of the window can be specified — how the drapery mounts, how it returns, how it stacks, how it relates to the room — because we know what the room is asked to do. Volume III can take up fabric, because the functional requirements have already eliminated the fabrics that cannot meet them. Volumes IV through VII can take up heading, hardware, motion, fabrication, installation, and stewardship, each with the brief as their reference.

Volume I closes here. The first conversation listened. The walk-through read the room. The lifestyle conversation read the life. The brief writes what we agreed to design. Everything that follows is the work of honoring it.