More Trade Secrets Soon!

Drapery Row's Trade Secrets is a hand selected collection of high end designer fabrics made available for a limited time at well below wholesale (and sometimes below the original cost to manufacture). I litterally spend several hours every week coming high end fabric house collections to pluck these beauties out of their respective bins. Today, I've made a deal with an ultra-high end Virginia fabric boutique to offer even more selection of ultra-high end exclusive designs. Thanks to our partnership, Drapery Row will offer the internet's best kept secrets, one-of-a-kind high end designer fabrics at prices you've come to expect.

I'm excited to enter this, the next chapter of our fabric story.

Coming In: Dalesford by Duralee

Duralee really seems to like going big lately in their prints. I'm bringing in a trie of Ikat/ Kilim type prints called Dalesford. Dalesford features a 13.5" x 13.5" size abstract design that seems to be paying a little bit of a tribute to the classic arabesques of old but retaining a mid-century modern feel to it. These prints are printed on a linen/ cotton cloth that is 55% linen and 45% cotton. You get a slight linen texture from the blend, but the overall effect is lightweight and breathable.

As for the pattern, Duralee seems to be going for maximum impact. Whether you choose to use Dalesford for draperies, upholstery, or pillows, there is nothing understated about the scale and the stark contrasts, which play with light and draw the eye into the grainy print texture. From a distance the pattern almost looks woven into the cloth.

It's easy to see why this and Loop de Loop were the cornerstones of the Walton Exclusive Prints Collection, they continue Duralee's run of trend forward designs at reachable prices.


Patterns from the Walton Collection can be purchased at www.draperyrow.com  keyword: "walton"

Thinking about Modernism: Louis Kahn

I've been working on a magazine article about the modernist architect Louis Kahn. Louis was one of the foremost monolithic modernist architects of the twentieth century. His timeless Salk Institute campus is featured in the current Lincoln MKX television spot and is the backdrop for this screen capture of the Lincoln website:

No offense to the good folks at Lincoln, but I hope their current crop of luxury automobiles are more reliable than the 2005 Lincoln Navigator I used to drive.

It's a beautiful pitch, luxury in the midst of brutalist architecture. I can imagine the iconic Kahn, straight laced, wearing his suit and iconic glasses looking at the sculpture of these vehicles and I wonder what he'd think of this built work being used as the backdrop of a salespitch. I like the ad because of its tone and imagery- but maybe that's the Pavlovian impulse in me to praise works that I recognize.

Kahn was also featured in a brilliant documentary called My Architect: A Son's Journey. This 2003 film follows Kahn's son Nathaniel as he retraces the trajectory of his father's career to find what, if anything, is left of his father in the world. It's a journey that touches me because I will never know who my father is. Following Nathaniel's journey allowed me some measure of satisfaction of seeing someone in a similar situation as myself discover where they came from.

But more than these two instances, I've been thinking about Kahn because the big questions about modernism. Are these great monolithic buildings real? I imagine when they were built they were unlike anything ever conceived. I'm sure that they were shocking to some. Kahn was asked by my alma mater, the University of Virginia to design a modern chemistry building- but those plans were rejected.

We are now fifty, sixty years out and Kahn's designs have become iconic. We've somehow bridged that distance in time where the revolutionary became historic. Now Kahn's masterpieces are the anonymous backdrop of a Detroit sales pitch.

I'll keep working on this magazine article as I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. Some days the mind is aswirl with ideas and nothing is clear or straightforward.