Holland & Sherry Drapery Fabrics

This page is every opaque Holland & Sherry cloth whose drapery use they state themselves: 814 colourways in 76 patterns. Most are wool, from the 13 ounce mélange flannels and sateens of Andes and Patagonia, in sixty-odd colours each, to the heavy tweeds, checks and plaids of the Savile Row, Sporting and Highland Fling collections. Alongside them sit the Moray cashmeres Holland & Sherry make with Johnstons of Elgin, the linen weaves, Silk Matka in silk and Spectator in silk and wool, three velvets, and the Higgins Giles & Co outdoor cloths for a loggia or a cabana.

Every one is 48 to 61 inches wide, so a drapery panel joins widths with the seams inside the pleats, and the repeat, where there is one, is matched at every seam. Every pattern opens to its own page with all of its colourways, Holland & Sherry's figures, their end-use line and drapery note, and a link to their photographs. Your designer orders the cloth; we measure, give the yardage, and cut, sew and install it.

Wool drapes with weight and quiets a room, and it resists flame on its own: it needs far more heat to ignite than cotton, does not melt or drip and puts itself out when the flame is removed. Closed, a lined wool drapery gives complete privacy, and with a blackout lining a bedroom goes dark. That is why a suiting cloth turns up in studies, libraries, dining rooms and bedrooms, and why the weight of a flannel or a tweed reads as tailored rather than decorative.

What wool does not do is take the sun. Prolonged direct sun fades it and weakens it, so on bright south and west glass a wool drapery hangs behind a solar shade, and the lining carries the light. It can stretch a little over time in humid air, which is one reason Holland & Sherry advise hanging the drapery before the hem is set, and like silk it is a protein fibre that wants an air-conditioned house rather than one shut up for the summer.

None of the cloths on this page is a wide-width cloth, so none is railroaded and none runs seamless across a wall of glass; on a wide window the panel is made of joined widths, the seams hidden in the pleats. For a seamless wall, the sheers are on the sheer page, and for a drapery cloth wider than the roll there are the 118 inch goods in the Alendel drapery library, which we order ourselves.