They cut metal and build lighting in-house. They still had to call someone for the fabric.

"This design presents some technical challenges I am confident that you can help us… we are still exploring the correct fabric and framing system and we think that with your expertise you could orientate us about the correct fabric and system to realise this."

— Project Manager, Di Emme Creative Solutions, first enquiry, July 2022

The constraint

Di Emme are a custom architectural design, metal fabrication and custom lighting company. They came to us with a design they could not build: a double-height, freestanding translucent volume inside a premium car showroom — a working consultation room that reads as a single block of light.

The brief specified a maximum 55mm sight line across every panel joint — 25mm of aluminium each side — so the lit surface would read as a continuous plane rather than a grid of boxes. Commodity profiles run 80 to 100mm and were never an option. The skin had to be white, translucent, stretchable, cut and puncture resistant, and fire-rated to commercial building standard. The upper section hangs from the structure to achieve the floating effect, so every gram of frame and hardware was a structural question.

Every stock SEG fabric was too dense to read through. Working through sample rounds with our manufacturing partner we specified an 80gsm satin — roughly a third of standard backlit weight, and never made for tension frames at all.

80gsm sheer fabric panel on the workbench, bench texture readable through the tensioned fabric

At 80gsm, there is no forgiveness.

A standard backlit fabric absorbs a two or three millimetre cutting error inside its own thickness and stretch — stock SEG stays opaque and forgiving because it is two to three times heavier. An 80gsm sheer does not forgive. The same error arrives on site as a wrinkle, a shrink line, or a slack corner across a two-metre panel — in a showroom, under light, at eye level.

At 80gsm the fabric also tore under standard heavy-duty keder machinery. We identified the failure mode and specified production onto lighter machinery at reduced feed speed, then held manufacture to it. And because the structure hangs, we specified a reduced-mass connector — standard SEG connectors were simply too heavy.

  • Translucent fabric walls of the illuminated cube in daylight, furniture readable through the fabric

    Translucent, not transparent

    Enough to read movement through the wall, enough to give the room privacy.

  • Finished 80gsm fabric panel lying flat with even tension corner to corner

    Even tension, corner to corner

    A finished panel with a clean silicone edge and no draw at the seam — the bench texture legible straight through it.

The per-panel regime we specify and enforce

Measure. Every panel dimensioned individually against the frame it will occupy — no nominal sizes, no families.
Test fit. Trial-fitted before the silicone keder is attached, to confirm the cut against real tension behaviour.
Sew. Keder applied on light machinery at reduced feed speed — the only method that does not tear the material.
Re-test. Fitted again after sewing; sewing changes the effective dimension, and the second test is what catches it.
Release. Nothing ships until it has passed the second fit — held to this, panel by panel.

Anyone can buy sheer fabric, and anyone can order a 25mm extrusion. The barrier is the per-panel test-fit loop across hundreds of panels — work that quietly destroys the margin of anyone who quotes it as a standard SEG job, and produces wrinkled panels for anyone who skips it.

Specification

Profile: 25mm, 55mm maximum sight line across a joint
Fabric: 80gsm satin, translucent, commercial fire-rated
Connector: reduced-mass, specified for a ceiling-suspended structure
Scale: six showrooms, no two sites identical
Installed by the client's own in-house team.

Fabricated by Wild Cow Visual Display for Di Emme Creative Solutions. Design and overall delivery by others.

Send us the drawing.

If it can be done in a standard system, we'll tell you so. If it can't, that's the conversation we're built for — and it usually starts with samples on your table, not a quotation. Email your drawing to enquiry@wildcowvisual.com.au or get in touch below.

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