Showroom

Claremont Furnishings

Trade account to buy

Specialist textiles and trimmings in the D and D Building, including the Georges Le Manach collection and Fortuny fabrics. Founded 1931.

Claremont is a British textile house with a suite in the D&D Building at 979 Third Avenue, which is open to the public, and buying requires a trade account. It is a wholesaler to the decoration trade rather than a shop, and it has supplied British decorators for decades from a London base, with New York and Los Angeles alongside.

What it carries is cloth woven on old looms by small European manufacturers, commissioned rather than bought in. The weave carries irregularities a modern power loom removes, which is why the house turns up repeatedly on historic interiors where a contemporary cloth would read as wrong in a room it is meant to belong to. Claremont began as the agent for Georges Le Manach of Paris, and it took on the Fortuny agency for the United Kingdom in 1970, which is a British arrangement rather than a New York one.

The palette is the other thing that separates it. Claremont's colours sit in a narrower and greyer range than most houses carry, and a scheme built on it will not accept a bright modern accent without looking like two schemes.

Anyone can come in and look at the cloth. Ordering it requires a trade account.

Small looms mean small runs, and small runs mean the yardage on a project is the yardage available. Check the quantity in stock against the cutting schedule before the cloth is presented to a client, because a Claremont weave that has to be rerun is a rerun on a loom that is not idle, and the programme absorbs the wait rather than the mill.