Park B. Smith pushes cafe curtains; expands kitchen textiles

Staff -- Home Textiles Today, 9/7/2001 12:00:00 AM

New York — Cafe curtains are no longer just "frilly" visors used to obstruct the morning sun through the kitchen window while one sips latte, according to multi-category home textiles importer Park B. Smith Ltd.

"People want them for more rooms of the house besides the kitchen, and they don't want them to be the usual frilly print," said Valborg Linn, director of design and merchandising. "It's a new lifestyle look for the smaller windows of the house in homes and apartments. And we want to provide that for our customers."

Linn said that Park B. Smith's new cafe curtain collection is "one of our biggest pushes" for the upcoming New York Home Textiles Show in October.

The collection, all of which is imported from India, will be twofold — part of it will fall under the Eco-ordinates line of vegetable-dyed 100 percent cotton goods; and the other part will fall under Park B. Smith's signature brand under the expanding kitchen textile category.

Under the Eco-ordinates collection, the cafe curtains will be available in eight patterns, of which each will come in up to five colors. Linn explained that while many of the cafe curtains for Eco-ordinates will coordinate with existing draperies in the collection, some others will be sold as free-standing offerings.

The company is also more aggressively increasing its kitchen textile offerings in time for the upcoming New York Home Textiles Show in October.

More constructions and patterns are being added to the company's two existing kitchen textile collections, which have been part of Park B. Smith's offerings for the past five years — Eco-Chef and Kitchen Kitchen.

The "most exciting new construction," according to Valborg Linn, director of design and merchandising, is the new tapestry line under the Kitchen Kitchen collection. For it, Park B. Smith will introduce three patterns, titled Sweet Cherries, Garden Sampler and Fresh Herbs.