Showroom

Samuel & Sons

Trade account to buy

Trimming and passementerie, over 15,000 items in stock. Tassels, braids, borders, and fringes in silk, wool, grass, and wood.

Samuel & Sons is a passementerie house, founded by the Cohen family, and it occupies a five storey building at 983 Third Avenue with the showroom running over two of those floors. It is a wholesale house rather than a shop. Prices are net, which is the plain fact behind the phrase to the trade: a designer's account gets the number, and there is no retail price to mark up from.

Samuel & Sons' range runs past 10,000 trims, which is what it takes to carry trimming in every form a drawing can call for. Borders and braids and gimp. Fringes in brush, bullion, fan edge, tassel and wood. Cords with and without tape, chair tassels, key tassels, holdbacks, rosettes and tiebacks, appliqué, and a performance range for contract work. The materials run past silk and wool into grass and wood. Designer collections sit within the range, Lori Weitzner, Michael S. Smith and Roger Thomas each carrying their own.

Semi custom and full custom are ordinary work here rather than an exception, which matters because trimming is the element most often specified to a colour that does not exist in anybody's stock range.

The showroom is open Monday to Friday from 9 to 6, and the building sits a few doors from the D&D at 979 Third Avenue, so the two are one errand.

Trimming is the last thing specified and the first thing that holds up an upholsterer. A custom dye or weave carries a lead time that the curtain maker has already assumed away, so the trim wants choosing at the same time as the cloth, not after it arrives. Pull the tape against the actual fabric in daylight at the window on the showroom floor, because a braid matched under showroom light will read as a different colour in the room it is going to.