Showroom

Pierre Frey

Trade account to buy

French fabrics, wallpapers, and accessories. Family run since 1935, now third generation.

Pierre Frey is a French textile editor founded in 1935, and its New York showroom is a suite in the D&D Building at 979 Third Avenue, which is open to the public, and buying requires a trade account.

What makes the suite worth a visit rather than a sample request is that it is five houses rather than one. Pierre Frey owns Braquenié, founded 1824 and the source of the printed cottons and hand woven carpets, Fadini Borghi, the Italian silk house with the damasks, velvets and lampas, Le Manach, founded 1829, whose designs reach back to Renaissance archives, and Boussac, the 1950s house Frey revived. Under its own name it edits plains, prints, embroideries, velvets and performance cloth, along with wallpapers, custom rugs and furniture.

A room needing a Braquenié print at the window, a Fadini Borghi silk on a chair and a Frey performance weave on the sofa is three houses and one account, one set of lead times and one delivery.

The archive is the other reason. Braquenié and Le Manach both carry documented historic patterns, which is what a designer needs when a room is being restored rather than invented and an approximation will not pass.

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

Specify the house, not just the pattern. The five carry different weights, widths and cleaning codes, and a scheme assembled from all of them looks coherent on a board and can arrive as four different hands. Pull the memo samples of every candidate together and handle them at the same time before anything is confirmed.