Trade Showroom

About us

Our philosophy

In today’s design landscape, many furnishing lines have regrettably started to favor mass production over artisanal investment. Yet the lines we represent are different.

our story

As founder and CEO, Kate Evans strives to find the perfect fabric, wallcovering, rug, lamp, or light fixture for every client, making each project as beautiful as it is unique. With more than forty years of experience and an inimitable eye for pattern and color, she is unrivaled at helping her clients turn their visions into reality.

Drawing inspiration from the English countryside and the Scottish Highlands to Bhutan, India, Russia, South Africa, Italy, and the Pacific Northwest, each member of the Evans & Sheldon family brims with personality, history, and dimension, paying homage to our shared history while looking to the future with optimism and creativity.

Founder & CEO

Kate Evans 

Drawing inspiration from her British, Cape Cod, and deep Washingtonian roots, Kate loves nothing more than connecting designers to the world’s most luxurious furnishing lines, helping designers and their clients create the homes of their dreams.

Kate credits her passion for interior design to the many years she spent at Tudor Hall, a boarding school in Oxfordshire, England, where she made the friends of a lifetime. As long as she lives, she will always remember the weekends spent at her friends’ homes, which were all unforgettably vibrant, eclectic, sophisticated, and inviting.

Fig 1.

Kate Evans, Founder & CEO

After college, Kate worked in fashion and then as an assistant at Christie’s auction house. But when the Design Center opened in her hometown of Washington in the late 1980s, she knew she had to make a shift. For months, she walked the construction site with her resumé, walking from person to person, until she landed a job at Westgate Fabrics and eventually Scalamandré.

After taking a brief career pause when her daughters Cornelia and Antonia were born, Kate continued working at the Design Center, though she always had a dream of establishing her own showroom in Georgetown. In 2013, she did just that, opening Evans & Sheldon with her first line — Penny Morrison — in a quaint carriage house on 30th and N Street. Over the past decade, Kate has grown Evans & Sheldon into a multi-line firm representing nearly forty lines from across the world.

Fig 2.

Kate on left, Tudor Hall, Oxfordshire, England

Marketing Director & COO

Cornelia Powers

After more than a decade of working behind-the-scenes at Evans & Sheldon, Kate’s daughter Cornelia took on a more official role in the spring of 2024, formally joining the company as Marketing Director and COO.

When not working with her mom, Cornelia works as an author and freelance writer, whose work has appeared in publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, ELLE, New York Magazine, and TIME. You can follow her writing on her Instagram, @corneliapowerswrites, as well as her newsletter on Substack, LINKAGE.

Connect with us

With reverence for the traditional and a keen eye for the modern, Evans & Sheldon serves as one of the nation’s capital’s preeminent design destinations, offering fresh insight while always empowering designers to discover and hone their own individual style.

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