The New York Design Center. More than 100 showrooms, open door, trade terms.
200 Lexington Avenue, 10016
ALSO KNOWN AS New York Design Center
200 Lexington Avenue is the New York Design Center. The building went up in 1925 and traded as a wholesale furniture exchange for decades before it became the Design Center in 1981. Sixteen floors hold more than a hundred showrooms, with thirty three thousand square feet of antiques gathered on the tenth floor.
This building differs from the D&D in the one respect that matters to a reader. It says plainly that it welcomes consumers and invites them to tour the showrooms, and it runs a programme called Access to Design out of an office on the fourth floor, which exists to walk somebody without a designer through the building and its resources.
That does not make it a shop. Individual showrooms still set their own terms and most of them still sell through the trade, so the difference is the front door rather than the till. What the programme changes is whether a homeowner arrives with a route in or arrives hoping.
The tenth floor is the part that repays a visit on its own. Antiques dealers are gathered there rather than scattered through the building, so a search that would otherwise mean a day of appointments across several neighbourhoods becomes a morning on one floor.
A building that spent its first fifty years closed to everyone except the trade and then opened its door has made a bet that the two kinds of visitor can share a lift. On the evidence of the tenth floor it was the right bet, because browsing and buying are different activities and only one of them needs an account.
Who trades here
The showrooms and galleries in this building that the guide covers. Not the full tenant list.
Within walking distance