A Suspended Net Is a Structural Decision, Not a Finishing Touch

Somewhere around the middle of most net projects, a phone call happens. The plaster is on, the floors are down, the joinery has been measured. Someone sends a photograph of a beautiful double-height room and asks whether we can put a net across the void.

Sometimes the answer is yes, and everyone is delighted. Often the answer is that it was a yes six months ago, and it has become an expensive maybe.

net is a structure made of resistant materials such as polyamide or hemp, which can be fixed at the level of a mezzanine or a void overlooking a lower floor. There are several types of nets, including knotless ones, which are more discreet, and knotted ones, offering a traditional look. These nets allow you to optimize space while providing effective protection against falls. 

Why It Reads as a Finish

The mistake is understandable, because everything about how nets are encountered suggests softness. They appear in interior photography. They are described in terms of light, volume and feel. They arrive rolled up in a box and go in during a single day, often after the painters have left.

Structure is non-existent, but the box is the last five per cent of the project. The other ninety-five happened inside the building’s frame, and most of it had to happen before the walls were closed.

The Bit That Surprises People

A net does not hang. Suspended net—whether it is an architectural mezzanine or some other net inside a home or an outdoor “space net” high above a canyon, or an immersive museum installation—they are usually hit by several unexpected physical and psychological sensations. The edges pull inward, toward each other, hard and without pause, for as long as the net exists.

This is why the question is never just “is the wall strong enough?” Plenty of walls carry substantial vertical load and have never in their lives been asked to resist something tugging at them horizontally, year after year, in a direction the original builder never considered. Masonry is generally content. Timber depends entirely on section, span, and how it is restrained. Partition walls are not part of this conversation at all.

An engineer resolves this quickly when asked at the right moment. The difficulty is that the right moment is early, and the question usually arrives late.

What Each Stage of a Project Costs You

The same net, specified at four different points, produces four different projects.

• At the design stage, a net costs almost nothing beyond the net. There is a drawing, and the drawing can accommodate a beam, a thickened section of blockwork, a padstone, whatever the geometry needs. Adding structural provision to a line on a plan is the cheapest intervention available in construction.
• At the structural design stage, it is still straightforward. The engineer is already calculating; adding one more load case is marginal work.
• At first fix, it gets real but still looks doable. The frame, so what is available can be evaluated truthfully. Can add steel. Access is good. Nothing has been finished that would need undoing.
• After the finishes go on, something is different. Now to find what is behind a surface means opening that surface. Adding structure means removing and remaking work that was just paid for. Structure that would have been there anyway has gone. The cost of net hasn’t changed; the thighs around the net have. None of this is unique to netting — it is ordinary in building work. It is only worth stating because nets are so rarely thought of as building work.

Three Conversations Worth Having Early

• With your engineer, before the structural drawings are selected. The question is simple and easy to answer: there will be sustained horizontal tension across this opening, at roughly this height, of roughly this magnitude — what would the structure need? A manufacturer can provide meaningful loads for a suggested size before anything is decided.
• With your client, just so it’s not an assumption. Nets are photogenic, which means clients fall for them from images that show no fixings, no anchor detail, and no indication of what the building behind the picture had to be. Being clear that this is a structural item, priced consequently, prevents the discussion that otherwise happens at the worst possible moment.
• With your manufacturer, Most are used to being contacted at the ordering stage and are pleasantly surprised to be asked at concept stage instead. That is when the advice is worth the most — and when a manufacturer can tell you that what you have drawn will need subdividing, or that the geometry you have in mind makes tensioning awkward.

The Projects Where It Goes Well

The successful ones share a shape: someone decided early.

A barn conversion where the tie beams were already doing the right job, and the net simply used what the eighteenth century had provided. A new-build where a modest steel was added at design stage specifically so that a void could be netted later, if the budget allowed — and three years later, it was. An attic conversion where a flat ceiling section was created partly to make the net possible, at no meaningful extra cost, because the decision preceded the carpentry.

In each case the net was cheap. The building had already done the hard part.

Knowing When To Say No

Good to say plainly,  cause the attraction in a design meeting runs the other way, so sometimes the answer should be no.

If a client wants somewhere to put furniture, they want a mezzanine floor, and a net will disappoint them. If they want a quiet room above a noisy one, mesh will transmit every sound and every sightline straight through. If the surrounding construction is all partition and suspended ceiling, the building needs to be reworded is the only honest answer, and that may not be worth it. And in a rental, permanent anchors into structure are usually not a conversation the tenant can win.

Saying so early costs one uncomfortable minute. Saying so after the plaster has gone on costs considerably more.

The Principle

If you take one thing from this, then take this: move the net decision upstream, past the finishes, past the fit-out, into the same conversation as beams and openings. It does not need to be resolved there, and provision can be made for a net that never gets ordered. It only needs to be raised there.

The net is the easy part. It always was. What determines whether a project is delightful or painful is what the building was asked to do about it, and when.

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Written by the team at Feelnets, made-to-measure nets since 2012, for homes, hotels and multihulls worldwide.

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