Finding Retro Fabric the Modern Way

	Retro Revival
	Photo: Repro Depot

I used to believe that interior painting was the coup de grace for turning a newly bought house into a home. (I know home sales are so depressed that this "newly bought house" now seems entirely theoretical. Stick with me anyway.)

This was before my wife Lorraine and I repainted nearly every room in our newly bought home.

Or rather, had repainted, as diehard readers of this column know that we paid professionals to do the job.

Vibrant new colors brightened where once had been old-lady wallpaper, breathing fresh air into a doily-like domicile. Then came the realization: The curtains need to go. And those pillows no longer work, either.

Our house is an 1860 Victorian, but like many these days, our design sense dates from the 1960s, and indeed the types of pieces in our groovy furniture collection -- a hodgepodge of opportunistic and impulsive purchases from Craigslist, eBay and the odd antiques shop -- can usually be found under search terms like "Eames era," "midcentury modern," "retro" and "vintage."

While I have become rather accomplished in turning up furniture finds, the task of uncovering complementary retro fabric had two words written all over it: Google search, which is to say, square one.

Thankfully, Lorraine and I had a better, more refined starting point: her sister, Denise, who may have been the first New York City girl to wear a cowboy hat before that whole thing got played out. In short, the kind of uber-cool, one-step-ahead lady who could narrow matters down for us.

Pattern Plays

As it turned out, "narrow" only referred to finding the best online sites for original and reproduction retro fabrics, because most of these virtual outlets have a carpal-tunnel-inducing breadth from which to click and choose.

Take Repro Depot, which offers 32 subcategories under fabrics, from pre-1900s to the '60s and '70s, animals to western. We naturally gravitated toward the '60s and '70s section, where there were 140 offerings.

Repro Depot's vast collection of reproductions is impressive. Sadly, the fabric we had liked for the home office curtains weeks earlier had sold out in the interim; as with all investments -- and wrinkled fabrics -- you need to strike while the iron is hot.