More than 100 trade showrooms on 17 floors. Anyone can look, accounts buy.
979 Third Avenue, 10022
ALSO KNOWN AS The D&D Building
979 Third Avenue is the Decoration and Design Building, an office block of 1963 that has worked as a design centre since 1965. Seventeen floors hold more than a hundred showrooms, and between them they represent several thousand manufacturers. Fortuny took a suite when the building opened and is still in one.
The tenancy is the fact about this building. What a designer or a homeowner can do here is set by the terms the showrooms trade on rather than by anything in the structure.
Those terms are narrower than the shorthand suggests. The lobby is open and most showrooms will let anyone walk in and look. What is restricted is buying. Prices are quoted net to designers and architects holding trade accounts, and there is no retail counter on any floor.
Three routes lead to an actual purchase. A designer with an account can order anything in the building. The building runs its own programme for people without one, where its design director consults on the project and a limited number of items can be bought at trade price plus a fee. A client already working with a designer can carry a letter on the practice's letterhead naming the date, the showrooms and what those showrooms should provide, which lets them visit unaccompanied. Not every showroom honours the third, so it is worth calling ahead.
What follows from this for a project is scheduling. Samples are pulled by showroom staff rather than taken off a rack, and a floor of textile houses cannot be worked through at the pace of a shop. Designers who use the building well arrive with the scheme settled and spend the visit on weight, hand and finish.
A single address holding a hundred showrooms removes travel from specification, which is the argument for it, and concentrates the trade in a way that makes an account the price of entry.
Who trades here
The showrooms and galleries in this building that the guide covers. Not the full tenant list.
Within walking distance