Artee Fabrics & Home

The Artee outlet in Pawtucket, RI, made custom silk drapes for us. The woman in charge of the store found a fabric we liked and came out to the house to measure. She thought that the drapes should go to the floor; I asked for them to be slightly off the floor and line up with the bottom of the hot-water heating duct. She asked what backing we wanted (with no suggestion that silk requires a blackout backing -- which would have made the drapes too dark if we had picked it). When the curtains were finished and hung up it turned out that they were too short by six inches, that the pattern was not matched where the fabric was stitched together, and that there were ugly streaks where the fabric was so thin that it looked like netting. When the woman we were dealing with came out to see them, she agreed that the job would have to be redone and tried to arrange it. At that point we left on a three-week trip. When I returned I found that she had been fired. The owner, Artee, came to the house to see the drapes and began by giving us a short lecture about her preeminence in the silk business. Then she told us 1) that silk always looks like that (not true), 2) that it was our fault that we had not gotten blackout backing, 3) that the drapes had to be short because if they went over the heating unit at the baseboard they would be a fire hazard (not true; the ducts never get very hot). Besides, the workroom cannot have known that we had heating ducts, so this was just an excuse made up on the spot. In fact, Artee's business manager had told me that the woman must have measured wrong. Artee said nothing about the mismatched pattern, but she basically told us that the problems were all our fault. When we argued she just walked out and drove off. It was as though the woman running her Pawtucket store had been our employee and not hers. We had to pay the total cost of making the drapes up front, which made me uncomfortable. We did it because we liked the fabric. It took so long for the drapes to actually be made that the two-month window for disputing a charge on the credit card had long passed. So Artee has earned $3000 for delivering a bad product and terrible service.