Shabby Yet Stylish Decor

By Kathey Barberich
The Fresno Bee

Whether you call it stylin' with junk, recycling with pizzazz, eclectic but elegant, the shabby chic decorating genre forcefully demonstrates that everything old is new again. And it is so right now.

If you are not sitting on an overstuffed, preferably off-white slipcovered sofa surrounded by floral pillows of faded-looking fabric in a mostly white-painted room with an off-white chandelier hanging somewhere nearby, looking out into your garden dotted with rusty iron benches and chairs, you may be out of this somewhat offbeat decorating loop.

"It's a vintage look," says Jacquie Shore, owner of Impatience's Collectique, a shop in Clovis, Calif., that specializes in meshing old with new and in new that ooks like old. "We sell old stuff, but we also sell new stuff that is made to look shabby chic."

Hallmarks of shabby chic: White paint. Green paint. Peeling paint. Rusty iron. Aging fabrics. Scarred furniture. Lots of floral patterns. Chandeliers and hanging candelabras. Iron beds, outdoor furniture and garden accessories. Architectural pieces such as weathered finials, moldings and window frames.

So, why is this look popular? Glad you asked. "People love it because it brings with it nostalgia," says John Weigand, owner of the Crafters Palace store in Fresno, Calif. "They like using stuff that reminds them of their grandparents or things they saw when they were growing up. It's comfortable."

"For one thing, it's easy," says Shore. "You can find pieces that you like and you don't have to try to refinish them to make them look new. I believe that scratch marks on a piece are like laugh lines on a person's face. They are a natural part of what the piece is about. They tell something about its history, its character."

For Elizabeth Laube of Hanford, Calif., shabby chic is fun. "I love the look," she says. "And I love looking for old stuff and figuring out how I might use it, how I might paint it. The thrill of the hunt is as much fun as seeing how it all comes together in the house."

Laube discovered shabby chic a couple of years ago while visiting a friend in Seattle, the city that also brought us grunge. Her friend introduced her to the world of shabby chic through Rachel Ashwell's photo-filled book, Shabby Chic. Laube fell in love.

"Valuable flea-market finds; a peeling, antique vanity in muted sea green; an elegant, cracked chandelier; an enormous, slipcovered sofa with deep, plush pillows..." So begins Ashwell's treatise on a style that embraces mismatched chairs and china, faded velvets, dilapidated elegance.

"There's a romance about it," Laube says with a sigh. After seeing the book, she went to a flea market and bought her first piece, a worn maple side table, for $5. Laube added bun feet and painted the piece a cream and celery green, adding leaves in a darker green and sanding certain areas to make the paint look old. A sealer was applied for the finishing touch.

Since then, she's redone two maple chairs, giving them a whitewashed look. She applied three layers of white paint, sanding between each layer. She has a white-painted chandelier, for which she made fabric lamp shades, a white-painted candelabrum and a well-used buffet.

While her husband Paul was not initially enamored of shabby chic, Laube says he likes some of it. He recently built a linen cabinet with a beaded board interior and a glass door that he copied from a catalog that sells old-looking new pieces. The Laubes added antique hardware.

"I have the vision and he has the talent," laughs Elizabeth Laube, whose home was recently featured on a home tour. She combs second-hand and antiques and collectibles stores for usable pieces and goes to the fabric mart in downtown Los Angeles to purchase vintage-looking fabrics for pillows, cushions and upholstered pieces.

Getting "the look" is not as easy as one might think, according to Weigand, who, with Juan Bravo of Che Garage, has a large area of Crafters Palace that is devoted to shabby or retro chic. "It's labor-intensive, from finding the right pieces to applying layers of paint and crackling it to age it just right. It takes skill and practice."

Ashwell may have popularized shabby chic, but Laube and others who are adapting the look are putting their own spin, or their own colors of paint, on their found objects.

Ashwell, who is credited with labeling this type of decorating, wrote her first book on the subject in 1996. Her latest book, The Shabby Chic Home, was published last year. A frequent guest on HGTV shows, Ashwell now has shows of her own on the Style network. And, to show what layers of white paint and faded floral pillows have done for her, she also owns a string of Shabby Chic stores. Ashwell's line of licensed Shabby Chic products is also carried in other stores.

But Skinner gives new life to old things other than chairs. She is a self-described junk junkie. And an artist. She knows when to paint something to make it look better and when to leave it in its natural, peeling state. When she paints designs or stencils on an object, she uses bright colors. She likes the whimsical and the colorful, a la Mary Engelbreit and Debbie Mumm.

Skinner, who lives in a condo and uses her garage as a workshop, keeps very few of the things she makes. She sells most of her work at arts and crafts shows in Reno, Nev., and throughout California.

Some of what she does falls into the shabby-chic category: room screens or dividers made out of old doors hinged together, sometimes with mirrors inserted; vintage toasters converted into stenciled letter holders; new scenic prints placed in old window frames for wall hangings; garden art created out of rusty iron and pieces of picket fences; birdfeeders made out of lids to pots and pans; old mop buckets converted into flowerpots; shelves made out of drawers; wall hangings created out of cabinet doors and herb gardens planted in vintage metal ice trays.

"I like to look at pieces and see how I can funk them up," she says. "People like funky things and I just seem to have an eye for doing that. I like to give new life to old things. People throw away too much stuff that can be reused in different ways. Too much stuff goes to dumps."