Antique, rug and furniture dealers over seven floors, weekday hours.
306 East 61st Street, 10065
ALSO KNOWN AS The Interior Arts Building
306 East 61st Street is the Interior Arts Building, a loft off Second Avenue that its owner repositioned as a design address rather than letting it out as ordinary offices. Seven floors hold antique dealers, rug dealers, furniture galleries and a handful of design practices, which is a different mix from the showroom buildings four blocks south.
The tenancy is the fact about this building. What a visitor can do here is set by the terms the dealers trade on rather than by anything in the structure.
Dealers are not showrooms and the difference decides the visit. A showroom represents a manufacturer and can reorder. A dealer owns the thing on the floor, so what is there is what exists, and a piece seen on a Tuesday can be gone on a Thursday. Doris Leslie Blau on the top floor holds antique carpets, Lucca Antiques, Balsamo, BK Antiques and Objets Plus hold furniture and objects, and Liz O'Brien and Eric Appel deal in twentieth century work on the main floor. Bunny Williams Home, Birdie Fortescue and JAMES Showroom sit alongside them.
The building publishes no access policy and its dealers keep weekday hours. Liz O'Brien and Eric Appel are both open Monday to Friday and neither requires an appointment, though a dealer floor rewards calling ahead when a specific piece is the reason for the trip.
Gathering dealers in one building does for twentieth century furniture what the tenth floor of the New York Design Center does for antiques. A search that would otherwise be a day of appointments across several neighbourhoods becomes a morning on one lift, and the cost of that convenience is that the inventory turns over faster than any page can follow.
Who trades here
The showrooms and galleries in this building that the guide covers. Not the full tenant list.
Within walking distance