About linen

Linen is cloth woven from the stem of the flax plant. The fibres run the length of the stem in bundles, so they are long and thick, quite unlike cotton, which is a short, fine fluff.

Linen and cotton handle moisture differently. Every night you give off a fair amount of water vapour, which the sheet absorbs and releases, and that decides how it feels while you sleep.

Flax fibre takes up that moisture quickly and gives it back to the air, so the cloth stays relatively dry to the touch even when it holds quite a lot. Cotton absorbs too, but holds on to it longer, so your sheet sooner feels clammy and cold.

It is the weight of one square metre of the finished cloth: 175 grams. For linen bedding that is a middle weight. Lighter cloths, around 130 to 150 g/m², feel gauzy and wear faster. Heavier ones, 200 g/m² and up, are closer to upholstery linen and sleep warm. 175 g/m² is heavy enough to drape over the body and hold warmth, and open enough to breathe.

Raw from the loom, pure linen is naturally quite stiff. After cutting and sewing, we give the finished bedding an enzyme wash. The wash softens the fabric, gives our linen its supple feel and makes it gentle against your skin.

It gets softer with use and washing.

Yes. The naturally rumpled look is exactly what most people love about linen. Give the sheets a shake every morning, hang them to dry on a line in the open air after washing if you can, and enjoy the creases. No ironing needed at all.

It is a different soft from cotton sateen. Sateen is smooth and glides over the skin; linen feels dry and slightly textured, and it does not cling to the skin. Some people love it from the first night.

See our washing instructions for linen bedding and for throws & blankets.

Our linen is soft-washed after cutting and sewing, so it hardly shrinks any further. Please do follow our washing instructions.

Linen hardly pills; the fibre is too long and too smooth for that. You will probably find some short fibres in the lint filter after the first one or two washes: those are short flax fibres that come free in the wash. It helps to give the bedding a good shake before you first use it.

No. Thread count is a cotton quality measure, which does not really apply to linen.

Cotton yarn is fine, so a good cotton sheet has a thread count of 200, 400 or even 600. Flax fibre is several times thicker and can never be woven that densely, so our bed linen has a thread count of only about 80 or more. A lower number is not a lower grade.

The high thread counts in cotton actually work against breathability. The fine weave then lets less and less air through the cloth. Those very high counts are often achieved with multi-ply yarns twisted together, which adds weight and shine but not breathability. Linen's open weave does exactly the opposite.

For linen, fabric weight, origin and finishing tell you more. Ours is 175 g/m², enzyme soft-washed.

Linen feels fresh and cool when you first slip into bed. That feeling soon passes as the fabric warms against your skin. How warm you feel through the night depends mainly on your duvet.

Our 175 g/m² linen duvet cover works year-round, with a light duvet in summer or a warmer one in winter. On warm summer nights, combine our linen flat sheet with one of our exclusive pure linen blankets.

Because the fibre is thick. A thick fibre woven densely gives a stiff, heavy cloth, so linen is woven with room between the threads. That open structure is what lets air and moisture through. Hold a sheet up to the window and you will see daylight through it. That is normal.

See our Size guide.

Certainly. Order our swatch boxes for linen bedding and for throws & blankets.

Because processing it is fairly labour-intensive and less of it is grown. Flax is grown mainly in a narrow strip along the coast from Normandy to Amsterdam, harvested once a year and then retted in the field. It is also scutched and hackled before it is spun. The yarn is harder to weave than cotton and breaks more often on the loom, so the weaving runs slower.

Linen is a natural fibre. It does not cling as much to the skin, and effectively deals with the damp of a good night's sleep. If you quickly get warm and clammy at night, linen is very likely to help.

We are based in Ghent close to the river Lys. Our long-fibre flax grows further upstream, along the Belgian-French border. The plant likes the damp, mild climate, and has been grown in these fields for centuries.

Our linen is woven, cut, sewn and washed in Portugal.

Partly.

Our linen blankets and throws carry the OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certificate, which tests the finished textile for a long list of harmful substances. Our bed linen does not currently carry a certificate (certification is pending). It is made of 100 % flax fibre and is enzyme washed in Portugal.

Flax grows well in the damp, mild climate of Flanders, along the French-Belgian border. Flax has been grown and worked here for many centuries – and it has stood the test of time. Flax grows there in spring and asks for little: rainwater is enough, and it is also fairly resistant, so the use of pesticides stays limited. After pulling – flax is not cut but pulled out of the ground, roots and all – the stems are left in the field to dew-ret. Dew retting breaks down mainly the pectin around the fibre bundles. It acts as a natural glue that binds the bundles to the surrounding tissue. Dew and rain supply the moisture that lets fungi, above all, break that glue down. The outer skin thus comes away from the fibre bundles, and the bundles in turn come away from the woody core.

The woody core stays largely intact. Only after retting is it broken mechanically into small pieces. These pieces are called shives and are beaten out of the long fibres during scutching.

Finally, every part of the flax plant is put to use, not only the long fibre that linen is made from.

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