Natural Wovens

Hartmann & Forbes

Natural Woven Textiles & Grassweaves

Woven by hand, so no two shades are identical

Hartmann & Forbes textiles are handwoven from natural fiber — grasses, reeds, jute, bamboo and papyrus — rather than produced on an industrial loom. That is the point of the material, and it is also the thing to plan for. Color and texture shift slightly between harvests and between weaving runs, so two shades cut from different bolts will not match perfectly.

For a specifier this has one practical consequence worth designing around: order every opening in a room, or every room meant to read as one space, from a single run. Shades from different runs hanging side by side are a common reason a natural-woven installation looks wrong, and it is easy to avoid when the room is ordered together.

Choosing between the collections

The Grassweave and Papyrusweave collections are the most textural and the most open — they filter light rather than block it, and they read as a material rather than as a window treatment. Colorweave introduces dyed fiber, which widens the palette considerably without losing the handwoven character.

Openness is the specification that matters most and the one most often decided too late. A loosely woven natural shade left unlined will glow beautifully at midday and give you very little privacy after dark. If the opening needs both, the shade needs a lining or a second layer, and that decision changes the pocket, the stack and sometimes the hardware — so it belongs in the drawing, not in the punch list.

Natural wovens on motorized and lighting-controlled openings

Natural fiber is heavier and less uniform than a synthetic roller fabric, and it behaves differently on a motorized tube. Roll diameter, bracket depth and pocket sizing all need to account for it, and a pocket detailed for a standard roller shade is frequently too shallow once a lined natural woven is in it.

This is where CMI's two sides meet. CMI provides both Lutron lighting control and motorized shading, so on an integrated project the shade, the tube, the pocket and the control system can be resolved together rather than in sequence by separate trades.

Specifying Hartmann & Forbes through CMI

CMI has supplied the tri-state design and build community — New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — since 1993, and we work wholesale to the trade — interior designers, architects, builders and commercial clients — as well as directly with homeowners.

For trade projects, CMI handles the work from product selection through measurement and professional installation. The full Hartmann & Forbes literature is below; if you are pricing a specific opening or need current lead times, it is faster to call.