An office is not a big home
A home has one decider. An office has a facilities manager who found the problem, an office manager who lives with the disruption, often a fit-out contractor, and someone above them who signs.
The quote has to survive that chain, so we write it to: one price per finished window, room by room, VAT shown separately, addressed to your company with your TRN. Nothing added later — a revised figure halfway through kills an approval you already fought for.
The real job is screen glare, not darkness
Ask what an office needs and the honest answer is almost never "block the light". It is "stop the sun landing on a monitor at half past three". Glare is angle and reflection, not brightness: a low western sun hits a screen at eye height; the same window at noon troubles nobody. Blackout answers it by killing the room, and staff raise the blind the moment you leave.
Sunscreen fabric answers it properly: an open-weave roller fabric with a stated openness factor — the lower the number, the tighter the weave and the more glare it cuts. You keep the view and the daylight, and the reflection goes. Daytime privacy only, though — after dark with the lights on, people see in.
Open plan, meeting rooms and reception
Open plan wants consistency: one fabric, one colour, every blind at the same height — a specification problem, not a discipline problem. Sunscreen rollers, chain or motorised.
Meeting rooms want control: a screen readable with the lights down, in ten seconds. Dim-out or blackout roller, side channels specified before manufacture if you genuinely need dark.
Reception is a shop window, the one place where appearance leads. Zebra blinds earn their keep: the double layer dials privacy through the day and reads considered, not institutional.
What suits an office, and what does not
Roller and zebra blinds do most of the work in a workplace, and the fabric matters more than the mechanism; the rest of the range sits in blinds. Roman blinds suit a boardroom or private office, but they are width-limited, hold dust, and wrong across an open floor.
We do not fit vertical blinds. They rattle in the draught from a diffuser, slats detach and never hang right again, and they date a fit-out faster than anything else in the room. Verticals are usually bought for very wide floor-to-ceiling glass; there we fit wide-width sunscreen rollers instead, or two or three aligned on one line. If a vertical really is the only answer, we will tell you we are not your supplier.
And curtains, which we make and sell for a living: in an office they are usually wrong. They collect dust in a space already running recycled air, they need cleaning on a cycle nobody has budgeted for, and they fight an open-plan glass interior. A boardroom can carry them; a floor of desks cannot. More in curtains or blinds.
Fire retardancy: what to ask for
Plenty of suppliers put "fire retardant" on the page and leave it there. Flame-retardant fabric is fabric that has passed a named test, and the named test is the only part that means anything. For hanging textiles the usual ones are NFPA 701, DIN 4102 B1, French M1 and BS 5867 Part 2. NFPA 701 measures weight lost and how long it burns after the flame goes. A fabric is either inherently flame resistant — the fibre will not sustain a flame — or chemically treated, a finish applied to ordinary fabric. Ask for a test report or Certificate of Conformity naming the fabric, the standard and the result — not the word "certified" in an email.
What we will not do is tell you what your building requires — that varies by occupancy, by building, and by what your landlord's fire consultant signed off. Send us the requirement in writing and we will meet it, paperwork attached to the quote.
If you lease your office
What your lease says and what your building permits decide where we can drill. Some towers allow no fixings into a curtain-wall head or structural mullion at all. Almost all want an NOC before anyone arrives with a drill — the commonest cause of a job slipping — so we start it at order, not on the morning. Whatever we fix to your walls comes out again one day, so we keep fixings as few and as small as the job allows and show you where they go.
One blind out of forty
We keep the specification and measurements for every window we fit, permanently — fabric, openness, cassette, drop, fixing type. Two years later you send us the room, not a tape measure, and the replacement matches the other thirty-nine. The same record drives our multi-site and portfolio accounts.
Your programme, and who owns it
A small office runs in the same window as a home. A forty-window fit-out does not, and we will not pretend otherwise: fabric volume, NOC approval, after-hours access slots and phased floors all stretch a programme, and none sit entirely with us. Larger projects are quoted with their own programme, worked out at the survey. Either way the date goes into your contract as a date, not a range. We commit to a date, not to a duration.
One named supervisor runs it from survey to last blind, under a one-year mechanical and labour warranty. Full process at how it works.
Questions facilities managers ask
Can you install outside our working hours, and does it cost extra?
Yes, and no surcharge — evenings and weekends are our default on commercial jobs. Your building's access rules usually set the date, not our diary.
Our building wants an NOC and a fire certificate. Can you provide them?
We start the NOC at order, not in the week of installation. Send the fire requirement in writing and we supply fabric that meets it, test report attached.
We lease the floor. What can you actually fix to?
Answered at the survey: it depends on your substrate and your lease. You will know where we drill before approving anything.
Two years from now, one blind fails. What happens?
Send us the site and the room. We hold the specification, so a matching replacement is made and fitted without a survey visit. In year one the warranty covers it.
How do we get this through finance?
Addressed to your company with your TRN, VAT itemised, one price per finished window, installation date on it. Need it split by floor or cost centre? Say so.
To start, get in touch and book a free site survey.