Frette: Linen Woven on Jacquard Looms Since 1860

Household linen is the only category of furnishing we touch eight hours a night and never look at. It is also one of the few where quality is proved with figures rather than with taste.

An Italian house of French birth

Frette was founded on 18 December 1860 in Grenoble by Jean-Baptiste Edmond Frette, Alexandre Payre and Charles Chaboud, to make and sell bed and household linen. Five years later, in 1865, the business moved to Italy, to Concorezzo, near Monza — where the headquarters have remained ever since. The most Italian of household-linen houses was thus born in the Isère, and left it after five years.

It has been outfitting hotels, ocean liners and private homes ever since: a trade where reputation is built on how a thing holds up over time rather than on seasonal novelty. This is a field without autumn collections.

The Jacquard loom, and why it is slow

Frette was the first maker of bed linen to adopt and then perfect the Jacquard loom — the punched-card machine that allows damasks, brocades and great coats of arms to be woven with a precision no handloom reaches at that scale. The looms are installed at Concorezzo.

The detail that says everything about the craft: even today, the threads are mounted by hand on the Jacquards, and it takes more than a week to place and fix each one before the first piece can be woven. The making time of a sheet is therefore counted not from the weaving, but from the mounting.

Why it interests us

We spend the year explaining how to tell an edition from a copy on furniture, and it is a matter of the eye: proportions, thicknesses, markings. Linen is the reverse case, and that is restful. Thread count, twist, weave, wash: everything can be measured. There is no version at a tenth of the price with the same count — thread costs what it costs, and it is the greater part of the price.

Put another way: on a sheet, the budget does not pay for a signature, it pays for a material. That is rare enough in the home to be worth saying.

Getting there

Frette — 49 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris. During Paris Design Week.

The Beyit gesture: photograph a piece and scan it — the tool tells you who makes it, at what price, and what exists around it.