August 10, 2026

How NYC Designers Work with an LIC Drapery Workroom

Upholstery

Start with the COM: sidemarks, receiving, and inspection

The short answer to a smooth project: get your COM to the workroom correctly tagged, and everything downstream gets easier. Every shipment to our Long Island City workroom should carry a sidemark with your firm name, project name, and room designation, matching the sidemark on your purchase order. When a bolt arrives labeled simply with a mill name and no sidemark, it sits in receiving while someone plays detective, and that is where lead times quietly slip.

Have your fabric vendor ship directly to the workroom whenever possible. We log every receipt, measure yardage against the cut order, and inspect for flaws, printing defects, and dye lot variation before anything hits a table. If we find a problem, you hear about it within a day or two of receipt, while there is still time to source replacement yardage without blowing the install date.

For upholstery COM, send a few extra yards beyond the estimate when the pattern has a large repeat or the piece has a tricky rail. A yard of insurance is far cheaper than a reorder against a sold out dye lot.

Site measures: what a workroom measure actually covers

A designer sketch gets us started, but a workroom site measure is what lets us guarantee fit. Our installers measure each opening at multiple points, check plumb and level, note HVAC grilles, crown depth, window hardware, and pocket dimensions, and confirm mounting conditions, whether that is concrete, steel, plaster over lath, or a motorization pocket that needs blocking before the GC closes the ceiling.

The best time to bring us in is before the walls close. On new construction and gut renovations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, an early walkthrough lets us coordinate blocking, power for motorized shades, and pocket depths with the GC and electrician. That single meeting prevents most of the expensive surprises we see on install day.

Building access and COIs in Manhattan and Brooklyn

New York buildings run on paperwork, and a missed COI can cost you your elevator reservation and a week on the schedule. Send us the building management contact and insurance requirements as soon as you book a measure or install. We carry the coverage levels most Manhattan condo and co-op boards require and can typically turn a certificate around within a business day, but some managing agents take three to five days to approve, so build that in.

Ask early about freight elevator hours, protection requirements, and whether the building restricts work to certain days. A prewar co-op with a 9 to 4 freight window and mandatory Masonite runs differently than a Williamsburg loft with street parking. We plan crews and truck loads around those realities, but only if we know them in advance.

Realistic lead times from LIC to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Hamptons

From our Long Island City workroom, plan on roughly six to eight weeks for custom drapery and roman shades from COM receipt, eight to ten weeks for upholstery and custom furniture, with bedding often faster. Those windows assume the fabric is in house and inspected, which is why COM timing matters more than anything else on the calendar.

Geography matters mostly at the install stage. Manhattan and Brooklyn installs can usually be scheduled within a week or two of completion, subject to building access. Hamptons installs run seasonally: from May through August we book East End trips several weeks out and often group projects by area, so flag a Memorial Day deadline in February, not April.

If you are working across coasts, our Los Angeles workroom and San Francisco office run on the same standards and sidemark system, which keeps bicoastal projects consistent. Send us your drawings and fabric schedule and we will build the timeline backward from your install date.