The other day, we passed a construction site made curiously beautiful by the addition of sheer mesh scrims displaying murals of leafy foliage and tulip fields (below). We love construction sites, but they do often present a rather bleak, harsh atmosphere. Although we could still make out the messy site behind the scrim, somehow the overlaid nature images transformed it into something oddly beautiful, and way softer. We thought:  Yay, someone has finally started applying a bright, aesthetic sensibility to these ugly spots.

Then we wondered if this scrim-like material could have applications inside a home. We found Camouflage, a Finnish company making delightful disguises out of sheets of die-stamped flowers.

We can think of so many uses for Camouflage, including curtains for patio doorways (the sun shining through would give a dappled effect), walls that need disguising…room partitions simply tacked to the ceiling.

Meanwhile, it seems there are new scrim design options appearing all the time, now that the idea is in the zeitgeist. Landscape architect Ken Smith designed and fabricated The Wallflowers Project, a large-scale flower scrim for the front of Cooper Hewitt museum’s nineteenth-century building as part of the museum’s 2006 Design Triennial. Thousands of three-dimensional silk flowers ornament flower cut-outs, which were attached on a scrim of safety orange construction fencing.

And of course, there are the scrims we stumbled on downtown, which give a sense of “basic” possibilities.

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We can imagine bold black and white stripes, or perhaps Marimekko’ish Scandinavian designs…Meanwhile, we’re definitely going to try to hunt down Camouflage’s cool flowered scrim…