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Hand-looming at the mill in Lyons, France


An exterior shot of the Prelle showroom at 200 Lexington


This brocade lampas was originally woven in 1860. Prelle was able to reproduce this Byzantine inspired stunning silk and it can now be found in Napolean III’s room in the Vapalière Mansion in Paris


The ballroom at Marbel House in Newport, Rhode Island with a Prelle hand-woven silk velvet



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NYDC'S DESIGN DETECTIVE

The New York Design Center’s Design Detective is traveling through the NYDC showrooms investigating fantastic products in an effort to uncover unknown facts and stories behind some of the industry’s most beautiful objects. The first case: the remarkable collection in the Prelle showroom.

Traveling past Prelle’s 4th floor showroom, one would never know that the exquisite silks hanging in the window come from an archive with a rich history. While the silks themselves are fresh off the loom, the patterns are identically replicated from century-old originals. Prelle’s woven fabrics come from the oldest silk furnishing fabric mill in Lyons, France. The company, dating back to 1752, is one of the only of its kind to have remained a family business for five generations. Since its conception, it has woven silks for palaces and castles such as Versailles and the Louvre. Prelle’s uniqueness lies in its ability to reproduce the fabrics almost identically based on archives and original samples.

With Prelle’s archives, descendants of the hand-loom weavers were able to recreate the gold and silver brocade in Louis XIVs bed chamber in Versailles (29 years of research and weaving at the rate of three centimeters a day), and the relief peacock feather brocade of the curtains and wall-hangings in Marie Antoinette’s bed chamber in Versailles. Prelle’s thorough archives are an incomparable source of documentation; museum and castle curators from all over the world use their archives for consultation as they restore historical monuments. The treasures they contain include rare items which don’t exist elsewhere.

Visit Suite 407 to discover these historic textiles and imagine translating these fabrics fit for kings into your own majestic residential palace.

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