The D&D Building and how New York's design trade works
979 Third Avenue, the to-the-trade showroom model, and the fall market: how the wallpaper and textile trade is organized in New York.
If New York's interior-design trade has an address, it is 979 Third Avenue. The Decoration & Design Building, which everyone calls the D&D Building, opened in 1964 and has been the center of gravity for the city's to-the-trade design world ever since: a Midtown tower of showrooms, well over a dozen floors of them, where designers rather than the public come to specify fabric, furniture, and wallpaper for their projects.
The "to the trade" part is the key to the whole system. The showrooms inside represent manufacturers and sell through interior designers and architects rather than to walk-in shoppers. A designer working a Manhattan apartment goes floor to floor pulling wallpaper against fabric and paint, reserves samples to carry back to the job, and places the order through the showroom on behalf of the client. It is a professional supply chain that happens to sit near the Upper East Side design corridor, and it explains why the best wallpaper in the city is rarely something you can buy off a shelf.
That said, the wall between trade and public is lower than it used to be. The D&D Building has run programs that let a member of the public visit and buy through an on-site referral or a designer-on-call, and several New York showrooms will sell to a consumer at a markup rather than turn the sale away. The full trade discount still belongs to the working designer, but "you literally cannot get in" is more legend than fact today.
The trade also runs on a calendar. The industry's fall market, a stretch of showroom openings, new-collection launches, and panel talks, turns the building into the season's meeting place, the moment designers see what is new before it filters out to projects. For anyone furnishing a New York interior, the practical reality is that reaching this level of material still usually means working with someone who has access, because in a city of prewar plaster, tiny elevators, and co-op boards, the person who knows how to order the right amount of the right wallpaper and get it up the freight elevator is worth exactly what they cost.