Decor Style Shabby Chic
The style known as shabby chic has been around since the 80’s and continues to be very popular. Experts are not predicting any decline this year. It was started in the US by Rachel Ashwell who has expanded her line of shabby chic furniture across the country and to other countries as well.
What exactly is shabby chic?
It is a style that in many ways is reminiscent of English cottages, which after all is normal since Rachel Ashwell is an expatriate from England.
Before all it is a style that is relaxed, retro, light and luminous. White is the principal color, but is enhanced at will by flowers, a little like you would think of a british cottage. Colors are often very light with a penchant for decorating with pale green paint. pinks, pale blues, and light yellows.
Shabby chic furniture is sold in many stores today and it is new, just pretending to be old or distressed. But the style calls for old things that have been recycled. If you have some old pieces of furniture, perhaps a little beat up and past their prime, you can make them fashionable again by converting them to shabby chic. Imperfections are not only welcome they are sought. If your furniture looks too new you will want to age it a little, before painting it in white.
Another popular way to make your style fit into this popular decorating trend is to add odds items for a purpose for which they were not intended. For example, you could bring in an old garden bench and use is as a coffee table. (I don’t know how you will sit in the garden but that is the subject of another article.) You can use chairs as night stands or an old wheelbarrow as a decorative element. Rachel Ashwell said it best when she said “be creative!”
For some shabby chic will be a bunch of old things with a bad paint job, and will go down as bad taste, but for others it is pure retro, it is green (I mean eco-friendly, since it recycles everything) it is comfortable vintage. The choice is yours.