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Kandell gave him no bonuses but
did send him for six weeks a year of
paid vacation in the south of France.
“Everybody would be there,” he
says. “I was so young. I never thought
it was a big deal. But when I look
back on it, it was a big deal. When
you are that young and that busy, you
don’t really think about who you are.”
He met Yves Saint Laurent, the
Rothschilds, and the Duke and
Duchess of England. He enjoyed
many visits with Italian princess
Donatella Colonna at her summer
palace in Ancona, Italy. He became
friends with Rosita Fanto of Monte
Carlo.
“Everybody was somebody, but
me,” he says.
He was never happy doing just one
thing. He had an antique shop, and
from there he launched his own fabric
company, Tressard. Not wanting to
be called simply a designer, he was
a founding member of the National
Society of Interior Designers (NSID).
He was an innovator from the
beginning. For an NSID luncheon
fashion show, Trull presented ready-to-
wear designs in furniture fabrics.
He asked actress Carol Burnett, who
was performing in the off-Broadway
production of “Once Upon a
Mattress,” to model his Tressard mat-tress
ticking.
“She said, ‘You’ve got a deal if
you won’t tell anybody my measure-ments,’”
Trull recalls, calling Burnett
“Miss Once Upon a Mattress.”
“It launched my company. She was
just a wonderful lady, just super nice.
The character you saw on her TV
shows that made her so famous was
her,” he says.
Trull became a consultant for
Heritage Furniture in High Point,
doing fabric selections and designing
their showroom.
Above: Trull’s
reputation as one
of the leaders in
industry became
firmly established
in the 1960s. Left:
Trull was one of the
charter members of
the National Society
of Interior Designers
(NSID).
HISTORIC PHOTOS COURTESY OF RANDY TRULL