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The Paris Apartment is a style of interior design that draws inspiration from French boudoir aesthetics and traditional French decor. This design style emphasizes elegance and cohesion, incorporating elements such as ceilings, walls, trims, furniture, light fixtures, curtains, soft furnishings, books, and color palettes. Common furnishings include chaise lounges, vanities, slipper chairs, beds, daybeds, nightstands, chandeliers, sconces, lamps, paintings, armoires, dressers, mirrors, and rugs. These pieces often feature hand crafted details, original painted patinas, and design elements spanning from 18th Century France to the Art Deco period.
Preservation of historical furnishings is a key aspect of the Paris Apartment style, with many pieces treated as valuable heirlooms. This approach emphasizes maintaining authenticity and celebrating the craftsmanship of earlier periods. The style may also incorporate distinctive international items to reflect personal tastes, resulting in a curated, individualized collection that blends tradition with character.
The style started in a New York City boutique and evokes the classic decoration found in highly ornamental apartments in Paris where there are moldings on the walls and ceilings. Other architectural elements include fireplace mantles, chevron and patterned wood floors, French doors, and windows. Details include hardware, chandeliers, chaise lounges, settees, boudoir chairs, sumptuous curtains and pillows, muted paintwork, and overall "bon gout." The result of The Paris Apartment style is to achieve an elegant, relaxed, modern, yet opulent effect. Renovating and restoring antique furniture and vintage fabrics, tapestries, and textiles is an important factor in getting the look. Finding, updating, and repurposing items from salvage houses, auctions, thrift stores, antique shops, estate sales, and consignment shops remains a popular way to create the look on a budget.
Fundamental elements of The Paris Apartment style include showcasing art on gallery walls, incorporating large furniture in small spaces, and embracing a maximalist aesthetic with an aura of excess. The style at the same time encourages a minimalist approach, using only what the owner needs—bedding, pillows, furniture, etc.—and only the best while focusing on details such as painted walls and ceilings, special doors, floors, and decorations. From Paris to Provence, the style takes inspiration in many forms from interior and exterior, whether it be architecture, gardens, fabrics, artwork or nature's colorful palette.
Trompe-l'œil, meaning "to fool the eye" is incorporated into the decor, creating an optical illusion of a 3 dimensional image on a 2 dimensional space, and can be used on doors, floors or walls. Many of the original 18th century painted pieces have a natural "distressing" on a furniture's finish with the wear predominantly on the hand rests or legs.This is a highly coveted original patina that is usually restored and protected while keeping the aging. The look can be imitated on unpainted pieces by applying glaze or painting, then rubbing and lightly sanding the top layer to reveal the wood or base coats. Newer vintage pieces are selected for their likeness to traditional French furniture, and can be interwoven into the look with a distressed finish. It is possible to create elaborate furniture with traditional handles, appliques, flower garlands, and other patterns. [1]
The same design concepts of employing genuine antique and vintage objects are used for the bathroom, dressing room, boudoir suite, garden, and balcony, in keeping with The Paris Apartment style. [2]
Earlier bedspreads, velvet, antique and vintage linens, vintage and antique chandeliers, and lovely rugs are other desirable decorative goods. [2]
The New York Times described the look as "playful and whimsical."
Decorators describe The Paris Apartment as cozy, peaceful, romantic, and inviting, similar to a French château or an old friend's apartment, whether it be a man or a woman. The style is typically linked to femininity. [2]
Variants of The Paris Apartment style include:
In 1993, designer Claudia Strasser opened a boutique with the same name in New York City. It was a 450 square foot storefront designed to look like a small Parisian apartment, filled with antiques, vintage furniture, and home décor from France. [3] The notoriety and unique shop piqued the interest of Judith Regan, editor at HarperCollins who approached Strasser to write a book on the style. [4] Strasser wrote The Paris Apartment, Romantic Décor on a Flea Market Budget, which was published in 1997. [5]
Readers of The Paris Apartment were taught how to create rooms with moldings, restore furniture, repay with faux finishes, trompe-l'œil and create a style based on their personal preferences, using The Paris Apartment as inspiration. [6] Strasser wrote her second book, Paris Flea Market Style, in 2013. [7]
Palace of Fontainebleau, located 55 kilometers southeast of the center of Paris, in the commune of Fontainebleau, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. It served as a hunting lodge and summer residence for many of the French monarchs, including Louis VII, Francis I, Henry II, Louis-Philippe, Napoleon I, and Napoleon III. Though the monarchs only resided there for a few months of the year, they gradually transformed it into a genuine palace, filled with art and decoration. It became a national museum in 1927 and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 for its unique architecture and historical importance.
A flea market is a type of street market that provides space for vendors to sell previously owned (second-hand) goods. This type of market is often seasonal. However, in recent years there has been the development of 'formal' and 'casual' markets which divides a fixed-style market (formal) with long-term leases and a seasonal-style market with short-term leases. Consistently, there tends to be an emphasis on sustainable consumption whereby items such as used goods, collectibles, antiques and vintage clothing can be purchased, in an effort to combat climate change and fast fashion.
Shabby chic is a style of interior design that chooses either furniture and furnishings for their appearance of age and signs of wear and tear or distresses new ones to achieve the same result. Unlike much genuine period décor, this style features a soft, pastel-colored, cottage look.
Pavlovsk Palace is an 18th-century Russian Imperial residence built by the order of Catherine the Great for her son Grand Duke Paul, in Pavlovsk, within Saint Petersburg. After his death, it became the home of his widow, Maria Feodorovna. The palace and the large English garden surrounding it are now a Russian state museum and public park.
The Blue Room is one of three state parlors on the first floor in the White House, the residence of the president of the United States. It is distinctive for its oval shape. The room is used for receptions and receiving lines and is occasionally set for small dinners. President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the room on June 2, 1886, the only wedding of a President and First Lady in the White House. The room is traditionally decorated in shades of blue. With the Yellow Oval Room above it and the Diplomatic Reception Room below it, the Blue Room is one of three oval rooms in James Hoban's original design for the White House.
The East Room is an event and reception room in the Executive Residence of the White House complex, the home of the president of the United States. The East Room is the largest room in the Executive Residence; it is used for dances, receptions, press conferences, ceremonies, concerts, and banquets. The East Room was one of the last rooms to be finished and decorated, and it has undergone substantial redecoration over the past two centuries. Since 1964, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House has, by executive order, advised the president of the United States and first lady on the decor, preservation, and conservation of the East Room and other public rooms at the White House.
Kelly Wearstler is an American designer. She founded her own design firm Kelly Wearstler Interior Design in the mid-1990s, serving mainly the hotel industry, and now designs across high-end residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces. Her designs for the Viceroy hotel chain in the early 2000s have been noted for their influence on the design industry. She has designed properties for clients such as Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz and Stacey Snider, and served as a judge on all episodes of Bravo's Top Design reality contest in 2007 and 2008.
Distressing in the decorative arts is the activity of making a piece of furniture or object appear aged and older, giving it a "weathered look". There are many methods to produce an appearance of age and wear. Distressing is viewed as a refinishing technique although it is the opposite of finishing in a traditional sense. In distressing, the object's finish is intentionally destroyed or manipulated to look less than perfect, such as with sandpaper or paint stripper. For example, the artisan often removes some but not all of the paint, leaving proof of several layers of paint speckled over wood grain underneath. This becomes the "finished" piece.
A bergère is an enclosed upholstered French armchair (fauteuil) with an upholstered back and armrests on upholstered frames. The seat frame is over-upholstered, but the rest of the wooden framing is exposed: it may be moulded or carved, and of beech, painted or gilded, or of fruitwood, walnut or mahogany with a waxed finish. Padded elbowrests may stand upon the armrests. A bergère is fitted with a loose, but tailored, seat cushion. It is designed for lounging in comfort, with a deeper, wider seat than that of a regular fauteuil, though the bergères by Bellangé in the White House are more formal. A bergère in the eighteenth century was essentially a meuble courant, designed to be moved about to suit convenience, rather than being ranged permanently formally along the walls as part of the decor.
Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 19-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1792), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of Ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow.
The National Museum of Decorative Arts is an art museum in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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Christie Repasy is an American floral artist from Maywood, California. She is best known for her Victorian style and floral-painted furniture.
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The Randolph Street Market Festival is a hybrid indoor-outdoor market held outdoors the last weekend of each month, May through October, and indoors the third weekend of October, November and December.
Chairish is a curated online marketplace for high-end vintage home furnishings and art.
The Historic Whalehead Club is a large 21,000-square-foot (2,000 m2) home located on a remote tract facing the Currituck Sound in North Carolina, United States. The structure was designed by owners Edward Collings Jr. and Marie Louise Label Knight and contracted by Daniel Peckham between 1922 and 1925. The home remains a prominent example of Art Nouveau.
Pioneer Goods Co. was a Boston-based home goods store founded in July 2014, that is now permanently closed. The South End shop, owned by Justin Power, specialized in Rustic Americana décor and furniture. Unfortunately, due to low sales, the shop and website have both been shut down as of 2019.