Choosing linen that lasts
Craft
Three numbers decide whether a linen survives fifteen years of use, and not one of them is printed on the label.
Most linen for interiors is bought on handle. Somebody rubs a corner between finger and thumb in a showroom, likes it, and specifies it for a sofa that will be sat on every evening for fifteen years. Handle tells you almost nothing about that evening, repeated.
Weight, weave, and the length of the fibre
Three numbers do most of the work. Weight in grams per square metre: under 200 for a curtain that should move, 350 and above for anything upholstered. Weave: plain for drape, twill or basket for seat wear. And fibre length, which no label carries, though you can read it from where the flax was grown and retted, because long line flax out of Normandy, Flanders and the Baltic spins a yarn with fewer joins and therefore fewer places to pill.
We specify washed Belgian linen for nearly everything soft. Washing takes the shrinkage out before the cutter sees the cloth, drops the crispness that reads as a hotel bedroom, and settles the colour, so what arrives is close to what the client will live with rather than a fabric still on its way somewhere. Colour is where linen misleads. Undyed flax is neither white nor beige, it is a warm grey that photographs cooler than it looks in the room. Piece dyed cloth carries on shifting in sunlight, so a curtain in a south room will be a different colour at its leading edge within three summers. We now specify yarn dyed for anything hanging in direct sun, and accept the smaller palette that comes with it.
Making it last
Construction outlasts cloth. A seat cushion in 400 gram linen over feather and foam, cut on the grain, with a zip that opens and a cover that comes off, will still be in service long after the same cloth stapled across a fixed pad has gone to the skip. We ask every upholsterer for removable covers, and we buy ten metres more than the job needs and leave it rolled in the house.
Then it wants to be used badly. Linen washed at forty, tumbled briefly and hung damp gets softer every year. Linen sent to the dry cleaner goes flat and stays flat. At Hôtel du Passage the curtains have been through a hotel laundry every few weeks for a year and they have improved with each one. Creases are the point of the cloth, not a fault in it, and a linen curtain that hangs without one is either not linen or holds enough polyester to have stopped being worth the money.
The oldest linen we own is a pair of curtains from the first room the studio rented on Rua das Flores. They have been through the machine perhaps sixty times, they are two shades lighter at the leading edge than in the fold, and they are the reason we keep specifying it.