New Luxury Showroom Lights Up the Dallas Design District

At 64 years old, Ellouise Abbott is Texas’ oldest design showroom, but it’s hardly a dowager. In September, the showroom relocated from its 10-year location at the International at Turtle Creek into a spiffed-up new showroom in the Dallas Design Center. Light and airy, the 6,000-square-foot space is ample enough to showcase Abbott’s many longstanding exclusive lines, along with a few new ones.

Look for furniture by Los Angeles-based Randolph & Hein; fabrics and wallpapers from TylerGraphic in New York; The Rosa Bernal Collection of fabrics from Spain; and the famed Italian Fortuny fabrics and lighting, which showroom founder Ellouise Abbott introduced to Texas more than 60 years ago when she opened her first showroom in Houston in 1951. Ellouise Abbott has been the exclusive purveyor of Fortuny in Houston and Dallas ever since, and the long legacy of luxury continues.

“I love showing the best of the best in residential design,” says Betsie Weatherford, who purchased the Houston showroom in 1994 and opened the first Dallas location in 2005. Weatherford dazzled us at her first Dallas showroom by hanging full widths of Fortuny fabric under skylights in the showroom, the first time the Italian fabric house had ever provided large-scale samples to a showroom in the U.S. For the current space, Weatherford has made an even bigger statement, draping 50 massive three-yard wings of the costly fabric throughout a dedicated Fortuny area.

There are also a handful of new introductions, such as Houston-based Carol Piper Rugs — the only rug line Abbott carries — and Fermoie, the premium British designer and printer of fabrics and accessories. Ellouise Abbott, to the trade, 1025 N. Stemmons Freeway, Suite 749, 214.239.8722.