A new build starts out clean and empty, and bare windows look their worst at that stage. Glass with nothing on it reads as unfinished in a house with nothing on the walls yet, and daylight comes in flat and hard because there is nothing in the room to soften it. This Little Elm home was at that point when the owner got in touch.
The request was simple to say and harder to carry out: keep the house feeling light. A new home sells itself on brightness, and anything that dims it undoes the reason the owner chose it. So the work was about taking the hard edge off the daylight without giving any of it up.
We measured the house and built shades in Bedford light gray for every opening, thirty-three windows, each one made to its own dimensions. Light gray is the color we install most often, and the reason shows up on site. With daylight behind it the fabric reads bright and clean, so it warms a room more than it shades it.
The change is hard to see in a photograph. The rooms kept their openness and lost the unfinished look, and the house went from finished by the builder to finished for the people moving into it.