Property: Home Deco Resolutions

By Domitilla Lepri

Here we are, a New Year is beginning and we all have plenty of good resolutions for the New Year to come. From a deco point of view, since many of you are living in unattractive rented apartments furnished by your landlords, the time has come to remedy your living situation and find cheap and simple solutions to embellish your home sweet home. If you are an absolute beginner, you will only need to go through five simple steps to have a quite decent result.

Step One: If your apartment has one of these marvelous representations of suspended Chinese baroque style lamps, remove them! If you don’t have any other light source in your room go to the light market of Xujiahui, or custom make it if you wish to have a Chinese lantern.

Step Two: Paint one wall of your room; use some vivacious colours: carmine red, saffron yellow, or petrol blue. The new trends prefer colours, and this will ensure your good mood. If you get bored you can always get rid of your coloured wall by repainting it.

Step Three:  Change your curtains; usually they are a weakness of rented apartments. If you don’t want to go for coloured walls at least you can have pretty curtains. Try plain colours with assorted borders, stripes or other patterns – just as long as they energise your interior! You can also ask your curtain maker to sew some coloured shapes on your plain curtains, for example a red star on a green curtain for those nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution.

Step Four: Buy yourself an old piece of furniture, Chinese or art deco style; it should be in bad condition in order not to spend a lot. A trunk to reuse as a coffee table, or an old chair for example, which you can cover or paint with funky colours or fabrics.

If you don’t fancy yourself a handyman, you can try to go to Tsaiyun Studio. The studio is run by Caterine and Armelle, two French ladies who are full of ideas and have great taste. They will help you redecorate your piece or propose something from their creations. The results are guaranteed fantastic – just remember to call before dropping by.

Tsaiyun Studio. Lane 24, 11 Wuxing Lu. Tel: 3469 1692

Step Five: Cover any furniture you don’t like in your apartment: sofas, tables, beds, anything can be covered as long as you have some ideas. You can either buy yourself a piece of fabric to cover any surface you need or ask professionals to help you. Muriel has a showroom in the heart of the French Concession and proposes many different designs for tablecloths, quilts, curtains and more. Every Wednesday morning she opens her home to show her collection, however she’ll be out of town until after Chinese New Year – just the right amount of time for you to get your apartment in shape and ready for coverings!

Muriel. Apt 7B, 198 Anfu Lu. Tel:  138 1789 2880. Wednesdays only.  

Domitilla Lepri is the owner of Shanghai-based DL Architecture, a firm specialising in renovation and interior decoration. If you have an interior design question you’d like her to answer in a future column, please email her at [email protected].