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After numerous odayrips to Boston and New York, Nancy Zwiener and interior designer Richard Ott decided central Connecticut was ripe for a high-end interior design showroom. In 2005 they opened DesignSourceCT, a 20,000-square-foot showroom. (Patrick Raycraft)

By Nancy Schoeffler

Against the slate-blue sky of a late autumn afternoon, the white building stands out amid the neighboring historic brick structures like a wedding cake — a five-layer confection of 18-foot windows, designed with graceful transoms, seemingly embellished with fondant. As a flock of crows sweeps across the sky in the final brightness of an autumn sunset, the former industrial building seems to glow.

Built in the early 20th century and easily seen from I-84, the old Barridon building at 1429 Park St. on the corner of Bartholomew Avenue housed a variety of manufacturers over the years, including the Hartford Rubber Co., Handi-Spring and a maker of airplane parts.

A view of 1429 Park St., a five-story restored factory building in Hartford, where Nancy Zwiener and Richard Ott launched DesignSourceCT more than a decade ago. The now vibrant neighborhood continues to attract creative people. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Today 1429 Park stands as a hub of interior design in Greater Hartford and as the highly visible anchor of Parkville’s creativity, revitalization and reinvention.

The activity seems infectious: In June the state awarded the city a $2 million grant to improve the streetscape and infrastructure along Bartholomew. In August, Ben and Joy Braddock opened the Hog River Brewing Co., a 3,700-square-foot brewery and taproom at the rear of 1429 Park St.

“We feel it’s a really vibrant neighborhood of the city,” Joy Braddock said. “We’re surrounded by a lot of other artisans and makers, people just following their passion, and we’re really happy to plug into that. … The momentum’s really strong here.”

Joy and Ben Braddock opened the Hog River Brewing Co. at the rear of 1429 Park St. in August 2016. (Suzie Hunter)

On Fridays and Saturdays, food trucks gather around the building, and the second Thursday of the month from April through October, Know Good Market, a pop-up nighttime street food market run by Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, has featured local food vendors and musicians. A Know Good Market holiday bazaar with crafts is planned for Dec. 10 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Hartford Denim Co. is next door on Bartholomew, and The Brothers Crisp shoe company is across the street in 1477 Park St., a building that owner Carlos Mouta calls the Old Park Plumbing Building, which houses a mix of small businesses and residences.

Hands On Hartford, at 55 Bartholomew Ave. in the Parkville neighborhood of Hartford, recently opened The Cafe at Fifty-Five. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Another historic building at 50 Bartholomew is home to the Dirt Salon, a cluster of artists’ studios. In October, Hands On Hartford, the nonprofit community organization that bought the long-vacant Spaghetti Warehouse building for supportive housing and a food pantry, opened the new Cafe at Fifty-Five.

The Dirt Salon, also on Bartholomew Avenue in the Parkville section of Hartford, houses artists’ studios and a bar. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Mouta said more than a hundred housing units have been added recently in Parkville, at a wide range of rent levels, and he estimates another 100 will be added in the next five years. Pope Commons, the shopping area that he owns across the street from Pope Park, is bustling and inviting, thanks in part to recent streetscape improvements and plantings.

Design District

Mouta credits Nancy Zwiener and Richard Ott, who launched DesignSourceCT as the anchor tenant in 1429 Park St. in 2005, for helping to get the ball rolling.

“Richard and Nancy betting on the neighborhood probably had a lot to do with other people betting on the neighborhood,” he said. “That was the beginning of people saying, ‘Hey, we believe in this.’ They continue to be a great asset to the neighborhood.”

When Mouta bought the imposing white building in 1999, he envisioned creating a “design district” with loft apartments on the top three floors.

It took a while for the idea to gel.

A view of 1429 Park Street, a restored five-story building in Hartford, CT, where Nancy Zwiener and Richard Ott launched DesignSourceCT more than a decade ago. The now vibrant neighborhood continues to attract creative people. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Zwiener and her husband, David Zwiener, who since has retired as president of The Hartford insurance company, were living in St. Louis and enlisted interior designer Richard Ott in October 1994 to help them with a house they’d just bought there. Less than a year later, David Zwiener was transferred to Hartford, initially brought in as The Hartford’s chief financial officer.

In 1995, the Zwieners and their four children moved into their first Hartford-area home — a large house in Farmington’s Devonwood area — and Nancy Zwiener asked Ott if he would travel to Connecticut to help with the project.

By the following spring, Ott also moved to Connecticut and launched his interior design business here. Zwiener says she and Ott were traveling every week to New York or Boston for design resources and accessories.

“After a couple of years of doing that,” she says, “and realizing there were very, very limited resources here, other than upholstery shops … we said, we can do this ourselves. Hartford deserves — central Connecticut deserves — a comprehensive design resource.”

It took them a couple of years of looking at what Zwiener calls “down-and-out commercial property around the 84-91 interchange” before they settled on the old factory building at 1429 Park St. as the site for their new venture, DesignSourceCT.

Housed in an early 20th-century industrial building, DesignSourceCT stocks thousands of fabric, trim, wallcovering and carpet samples, customizable furnishings, lighting, artwork and other home design products and accessories. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

“Carlos was anxious to put a footprint as a design center for Hartford,” Zwiener says, “and we became the anchor tenant.”

Leap Of Faith

Park Street enjoys an ethnically rich mix of restaurants, markets and shops, but the immediate neighborhood near the railroad overpass was a lot sketchier back then. Junkyard dogs lunged at passers-by from behind a chain link fence where the gleaming Fastrak station now stands. There was not much around 1429 Park at the time other than Bishop Ladder across the street and Lyman Kitchens and Robin Fisher’s RLF Home next door on Bartholomew Avenue. The Trout Brook Brewhouse and Grille that had replaced the popular Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant farther down Bartholomew Avenue was already defunct by then.

It was a huge leap of faith “to create something that had never existed in Hartford before,” Zwiener says.

She had worked at large corporations but had “never done an entrepreneurial venture before. We signed the lease on my 50th birthday.” She and Ott opened DesignSourceCT — an elegant, 20,000-square-foot interior design showroom with high ceilings and massive pillars — in August 2005 and celebrated with a fundraiser for the Parkville Boys & Girls Club that November.

“When we opened it was a very different scenario than it is now,” Zwiener says. “In some ways the economy was much better than it is now. The employment situation for executives in Hartford was robust, and people were being transferred in. Home building was stronger, and luxury home buying was stronger.”

It hasn’t been a cakewalk.

“Nobody really knew we were here, and being a wholesale business — a to-the-trade business, in a location with not a lot of foot traffic — our first challenge was putting ourselves on the map.”

Housed in an early 20th-century industrial building, DesignSourceCT has 20-foot ceilings, massive pillars, floating fabric panels and huge windows. Nancy Zwiener and Richard Ott opened the design showroom on Park Street in the Parkville section of Hartford more than a decade ago. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

The economic downturn that followed a few years later also put a major dent in the enterprise. DesignSourceCT had opened several retail outlets in the building, and then retrenched to save on rent.

But at the same time, many small fabric companies, drapery workrooms and upholstery shops went out of business during the recession, particularly along the shoreline, which sent many interior designers to DesignSourceCT.

Meanwhile, the internet was growing exponentially as an interior design resource, forcing more transparency into an interior design model that for years had been shrouded in aloof mystery.

DesignSourceCT stocks thousands of home design and decorating resources. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Back in the day, people had to show their credentials to even get a toe in the door of a to-the-trade showroom. These days, DesignSourceCT is increasingly open to retail customers who might not have worked with a designer before. Interior designer Nancy Perkins run the in-house designer-on-call program there, helping guide walk-in customers through the vast array of resources. DesignSourceCT also hosts occasional sales open to the public.

Several designers rent office space at DesignSourceCT, including Robin Jones. Zwiener points out that a number of his recent projects have enhanced Hartford institutions: He remodeled the ballroom at the Town and County Club on Woodland Street, as well as ON20 Restaurant atop the Hartford Steamboiler Building downtown, largely using resources from DesignSourceCT.

Still Evolving

The vision of a design district has come to fruition and undoubtedly helped elevate Greater Hartford’s interior design profile. It initially it took “a lot of chutzpah” for people to come down Prospect Avenue and turn left onto Park Street, rather than right onto Park Road into West Hartford, Zwiener says, but now it’s routine.

As DesignSourceCT has settled in, the West Hartford Design District along nearby New Park Avenue also has flourished and grown, drawing in new businesses, including, most recently, interior designer Kellie Burke, whose move from Farmington Avenue in West Hartford Center into a former Puritan Furniture building at the foot of New Park serves as something of an exclamation point for the design district.

Hartford-based interior designer Sal Modifica said having DesignSourceCT right nearby is “a convenience, but it is more than that. It provides options on furnishings that are targeted to clients who aren’t looking for that ‘metropolitan price tag.'”

He frequents the Boston Design Center but the showrooms there are typically at very high price points, “whereas at DesignSource you can find alternatives. People can find things that are relatable. The people over there are really great, and they know their stuff.”

Interior designer Sharon McCormick said that after the small Patricia Nicole design showroom off New Park Avenue in West Hartford closed, “there was a year of an abyss until DesignSource opened up.” McCormick, who is just now moving her office from Durham to Pratt Street in downtown Hartford, said she is excited about the idea of being able to dash over to Park Street whenever she get an idea — and she particularly appreciates running into other local designers there.

“I’m looking forward to the synergy of being with everybody, and to feed off the energy of each other, that’s one of the benefits,” she said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie. We can all elevate each other and the industry at the same time.”

Even so, a number of smaller interior design-related enterprises that once called 1429 Park St. home are no longer in the building. Lighting designer Ray Christensen — whose Ray Lighting + Design Studio was one of the earliest pioneers at 1429 Park St. — just relocated to a street-level building farther west on Park Street.

J. Namnoun Oriental Rug Gallery, which had a showroom in the building, reconsolidated at the company’s primary Weston Street location. That first-floor space is now home to reSET, the Social Enterprise Trust nonprofit that provides co-working space where people can find a desk, network and launch a start-up business.

Parkville is alive with a creative vibe. The former industrial building at 1429 Park St. that houses DesignSourceCT and a variety of other creative companies is in the background. (Patrick Raycraft | Hartford Magazine)

Like any vibrant neighborhood, this one keeps evolving. Jeff Devereux, who lives in 1429 Park and whose Breakfast Lunch and Dinner business is based on the building’s second floor, hopes that future development in the area won’t be at odds with the vibe and energy that have grown up there.

“It is an interesting place, one that could go in all different directions,” he said. “I’m hopeful that it will remain positive.”