Inspiration is fuel for the creative, ideas and concepts shared, borrowed, dreamt up are the stuff of all the design you enjoy all around you. I find inspiration in fashion, interior design, nature, music, food... generally everywhere... Often I will take the time to acquaint myself with my peers, usually online, usually at 2 am in the morning, fuelled by a late night snack of crackers and cheese.
One thing I noticed right away is that most drapery workrooms or soft furnishers that do have websites have been in business for over 20 years. That in itself is both amazing and disturbing. Amazing because that shows incredible staying power in an industry that is grossly under appreciated and generally unknown. Disturbing in it's expose of one of the major calamities facing our industry... lack of new blood.
Another thing that becomes very obvious very quickly is that not much has changed in that twenty years as far as styles, or as far as decorating in general. In a world where cars are exquisite sculptured machines, where even our phones and home accessories are beautiful objets d'art our curtains for a large part are still pretty boring and clearly do not reflect current tastes nor do they perform the functions that they are scheduled to carry out very well.
One of the reasons why I earmarked curtains as a business I wanted to expand into was seeing how gimmicky, how basic and how poorly the majority of curtains are made. They are frequently made by people who have no training in any form of curtain making, or sewing for that matter (imagine a carpenter building your stairs and having no training in cutting wood whatsoever) and generally sold by designers who may not understand the full spectrum of window coverings available and these days might receive one day of drapery instruction in university. And to these people are left huge budgets to make 20 year old style curtains... no wonder curtains have such a bad rap. In all my years of working in Vancouver and surrounds I have yet to come across a well made, well designed curtain. I am not saying they aren't out there somewhere, I am just saying that I haven't seen them. Perhaps a big reason may be that the people selling the curtains have no idea how they are made, the person making the curtain has no idea of the context, as they almost never visit the home or space in which they are being installed, and the installer who shows up is merely hanging the curtain to the best of his own abilities. Creatively, other drapery workrooms could aspire to challenging themselves, but why rock the boat, they have been making the same curtain for twenty some odd years, why change now?
