Everything the sample library did. And everything it couldn't.
A wall of samples let you pick two things up and hold them beside each other, which is how a designer actually decides. What it could never do was stay current, carry a cut sheet, or fit in the room you were paying rent on.
Digital catalogues fixed those three and quietly took the comparing away — one product per page, and you already had to know its name. Folii is meant to be both: things you can set side by side and judge, with the specification, the lead time and your practice's own history underneath them.
And being visual is not a convenience. It is what lets the design leave the practice at all — a client cannot read a planting plan, and a cut sheet is written for a specifier, not for the person paying for the work.
Set them side by side
Search the way you think — part shade, under three feet, evergreen — and get candidates at a size you can judge rather than a table with thumbnails in the first column. Plants, materials and products all behave the same way.
Know what you're choosing
The thing the sample shelf never carried: specifications, cut sheets, CAD blocks, warranties, lead times — and your own practice's record of having used it. Paste a product URL and it builds itself, configuration and all, with the source page and the date it was read recorded on every field.
Compose the palette
What you chose, assembled into something a client and a consultant can both read — plants, materials, products and precedents together, carrying their quantities and sizes into the schedule without being retyped.
Every fact says where it came from.
A price that hasn't been checked in a year says so. A zone rating names its source. An image carries its licence and its photographer. Where a rating doesn't exist for your region, the record says that rather than guessing.
This is not a feature list — it is the difference between a reference you can specify from and one you have to double-check. Native and invasive status are never inferred, because getting that wrong is a professional error, not a bug.
Your practice knows more than it can remember.
The catalogue is where you start. What makes it yours is everything the practice writes back into it, year after year — the part nobody else can give you, and the part that stops being lost the moment there's somewhere to put it.
Field notes
What actually happened on site, dated, with a photograph, attached to the record it concerns.
Flags
A warning one designer raises and another confirms — lead times, failures, substitutions that didn't hold up.
Project history
Where you have used it, with the photographs — the strongest specification argument a practice has.
Your pricing
Your supplier book and your numbers, with their own history. Private to your practice, always.
What's yours, and what's shared.
This is the first question a principal asks about a shared library, so it belongs on the page rather than in a policy nobody reads.
Private to your practice. Your field notes, your project history, your pricing and your supplier book. Nothing in them is visible to another practice, and nothing is sold to a manufacturer.
Flags are the one thing that travels — and only when you choose to raise one. A lead time that slipped, a plant that failed in clay, a finish that didn't hold up: raise it and other practices see it, confirm it, or contest it. That is what makes a flag worth more than a note to yourself. You can keep one private to your practice instead, and it still works on your own records.
Exactly what stays private →After enough projects, your experience is the standard.
Master specifications are where all of it settles. Not a manual somebody wrote once, and not a template inherited from a firm you used to work at — your firm's sections, arrived at one project at a time.
Every revision carries one line saying why it changed, so the reasoning survives the person who had it. Material records link to the section that specifies them, which means the library and the spec are one thing seen from two sides.
Plants
Not simply botanical information. What your practice uses. Where you've used it. What it looked like. What someone learned once it was planted.
Products + materials
Technical information, suppliers and finishes — alongside the more useful question: have we used this before?
Precedents
The images that shape a practice's taste shouldn't disappear into someone's downloads folder. Keep the reference, the source, the project, the designer and why it mattered.
Details
You've already detailed it. Folii helps the next person find it — with where it was used, what it relates to, and whether the practice still considers it current.
Specifications
Specification language connected to the things it actually governs: products, materials, details and project experience.
Palettes
Where the library becomes design. Plants, materials, products and precedent composed into something that moves straight into a project or a review.
A record gets better every time you use it.
Nobody sits down to write this. Each line arrives as a by-product of work that was happening anyway — a project, a site visit, a substitution somebody had to answer.
After enough projects, your experience is the standard.
Timber bench 01
- First useManufacturer, finish, cut sheet.
- After another projectUsed at Harbor House. Thermally modified ash selected.
- After constructionField note — concealed fixing revised during installation.
- After another projectPractice experience — typical lead time 14–16 weeks. Alternate approved at St Croix High School.
This is the difference between a catalogue and practice knowledge.
Your library isn't another folder.
Folders tell you where something was stored. Folii can tell you how it relates.
See the project side →- A bench belongs to a palette
- The palette belongs to a design
- The design is discussed in a review
- The review creates a decision
- The decision changes the detail
- The built detail creates a field observation
- And that observation makes the bench record more useful next time
That's the library Folii is building.
Ten practices are shaping what this becomes.
Free for the first year. Half an hour a week. One real project.