Hidden Treasure

Nora Burba Trulsson

>>> Janet Yonaty, Inc. Textiles & Trims, West Hollywood, California

Janet Yonaty finds inspiration everywhere. "I'll be in a restaurant and notice someone's handbag," she says, "or I'll see an interesting crystal chandelier or view the colors of fish in an aquarium. Maybe I'll find something at an antiques fair in Europe. On a trip to New York, I found a book about Art Deco jewelry that was fascinating."

With all these visions swirling before her, Yonaty synthesizes everything into her lines of sumptuous, exquisite trims and textiles that she offers through her trade-only showroom, Janet Yonaty, Inc. Textiles & Trims in West Hollywood, California. Her tassels, tiebacks, rosettes, fringe, trimmings, draperies and more can be found worldwide in hospitality projects such as the Wynn Macau resort and New York's Waldorf-Astoria, and in homes from Florida to Singapore.

Yonaty got her start in the decorative textiles industry in part due to her interest in fashion. A native of Iran, she was sent to boarding school in England, where she learned English and French. Upon graduation at the age of 18, she told her father that she wanted to study fashion design. "My father was very traditional," Yonaty explains. "He didn't want his daughter to be called a 'seamstress,' which is what most Iranians called women who went into fashion." Yonaty acquiesced, enrolling in the American College of Tehran, where she studied history and art. Upon graduation in the late 1960s, Yonaty broke tradition by going to work for various companies in Tehran, including a pharmaceutical firm. "I wanted to be independent," she recalls. "That's not what many young women were doing at the time."

Marriage brought her to the United States in 1971, first to Chicago, then to New York, where she designed a clothing line and had a boutique in Manhattan's Olympic Tower.

"This was in the early 1990s," she recalls. "Fashion had changed. Everything was just for one season. Style had lost something. I realized it was no longer my cup of tea."

A move to Los Angeles in 1997 followed, where she partnered with a family member in the decorative textiles industry — a career that allowed her to combine her fashion, art, history and business backgrounds.

By 2002 she'd launched her own business, creating lines of trimmings and doing custom work, with a showroom tucked inside a cozy 1920s house on Melrose Avenue. The location? Just across the street from the front entrance to the Pacific Design Center. Design professionals like the contrast between the PDC's dramatic glass and steel architecture and Yonaty's showroom, where they gather around a large wooden table in an intimate room surrounded by racks and racks of her jewel-like products.

The array is eye-boggling — brilliant colors, unusual details and a wide variety of fibers and fabrics, ranging from rare silks to solution-dyed acrylics for outdoor use. Most of her styles could almost be worn as jewelry on a simple black dress.

Yonaty has her trimmings made by craftspeople in France, Italy and even South Africa. For the Wynn Macau project, she had some of the items made in China. "I'm always looking for good workmanship," explains Yonaty. "I hope to go to Egypt and Morocco to see what kind of workmanship they do there."

Besides looking for workmanship, Yonaty is frequently on the road, attending such events as the Hospitality Design Expo in Las Vegas and a fabric exhibition in Italy within the space of a week this spring. She also stopped in London, seeking a showroom to represent her lines.

In the meantime, though, she's constantly designing, figuring out how to drill some octagonal crystals just so for a tieback, or translating the trim around the bottom of an antique cardinals' chair she'd seen at an exhibition into drapery trim.

"I keep a notepad by my bed, in case I get an idea in the middle of the night," Yonaty says. "I want the most beautiful things in my showroom."

Janet Yonaty, Inc. Textiles & Trims, 8642 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90069; (310) 659-5422.