Businesses converge for design district

THERE’S A NEWTRIANGLE IN TOWN. It’s strictly theoretical, but inside it are 14 doorways into more practical dimensions. This is the Design District Triangle, a partnership of Santa Fe design businesses whose owners hope greater awareness of their offerings will result from a combined presence.

Home visited the new digs of Reside Home to talk with its owners. Jeff Fenton and Chris Martinez recently moved from the Santa Fe Railyard to greatly expanded quarters in the historic Digneo-Moore House on Paseo de Peralta. We talked in one of the rooms that nowhold vignette groupings of the furnishings they sell; another room is a planning space for their design business.

They said the triangle idea had its roots in a discussion with Cara and Robin Evans, owners of the Ampersand Old & New shop on Sandoval Street.

Jeff Fenton: We were over at Cara and Robin’s beforeThanksgiving talking about ways for us to co-brand and leverage some of the home-furnishing showrooms and design studios that are in this area, which isn’t really part of the Railyard or the Plaza, and we felt like we had an opportunity to define this area. There is a concentration of design happening in this area. Certainly in the five years since we opened Reside, it has exponentially grown.

And your business has already been replaced at 340 Read Street.

It has. It’s K.O’Neal. Kelly O’Neal has had a wholesale-to-trade business for a long time and he decided he wanted a retail showroom to highlight his art, much of which is turned into fabric that he uses to upholster chairs.

ChrisMartinez: We’ve known Kelly for years. Art started for him as sort of a therapy, to bring his stress level down. And now he’s in our old space, which is so great. We’ve carried his pillows, we’ve carried his art, and now we have that resource here in town.

Fenton: We started looking at stores and home-furnishings businesses that were in an area that turns out is sort of shaped like a triangle. You can see on the map [at designdistricttriangle.com] that it’s bordered by Guadalupe Street and over to Old Santa Fe Trail, whereWallflower is, at the point, then to the other side of Guadalupe, with Array and Moss Collection at the corners. There’s a total of 14 businesses.

What aboutWiseman& Gale& Duncan Interiors and David Naylor Interiors a little to the north and west? Well, then we’d have this giant blob. Martinez: A parallelogram. And how about Santa Fe Home? Fenton: Chris went to them and they declined to be involved. We just stayed tighter. Chris went out and knocked on the doors and said, ‘We’re trying to do some- thing here, maybe a designation of a design district, so are you interested?’

Martinez: We were speaking with Cara over at Ampersand, just brainstorming, and she said in her previous retail life down in Silver City she was part of something called the Design Gulch. Gulch wasn’t really the right term for us, so I pulled out a map and sort of plottedwhere people were that we knew— HVL Interiors, French & French Interiors, us... It made this triangle.

I got everything up and running for Small Business Saturday [Thanksgiving weekend], the logos, and did the website, which is basically a directory. We’re all listed there and when you click on one of the logos, it takes you right to that business’s website, or in the case of Wallflower, to a Facebook page.

I’m trying to keep the website as simple as possible, but I would like to get a small blurb for everybody, to go with their logo and link, that says what they do.

Fenton: In major metropolitan cities, there are design districts, places where

PHOTOS BY PAUL WEIDEMAN A fabric selection at French & French Interiors. Bottom, a furnishings vignette at the French & French shop. Opposite, from the Array shop, three vases crafted in Thailand and an artist-made vessel.