Michael Gregor Ratz Interior Design Consulting

When you combine art with sentimental objects in a room, you create the essence of a warm and wonderful home!

Here a Palm Beach Regency style credenza in pink is offset by a cooler color pallette created by introducing strong white accents and prominent blues present in the framed photograph. Blue and white porcelain ginger jars and vases continue this color scheme and add a stately 'Chinoisserie' detail into this room's design.

Here are two rooms in similar yet visually contrasting, almost opposite textural color schemes showing the importance of art in a space and how one might choose to display it.

CHINOISERIE is a French word that means “in the Chinese taste”.
It describes a European style of decorative ornament that was wildly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still looks great today. Scenes of the Orient abound on textiles, wallpapers, pottery, porcelain, and lacquered and painted furniture. Owning a piece of Chinoiserie (or, “japanned” furniture, as some pieces were called) was the height of fashion. The interesting thing about Chinoiserie is the tremendous range and variety of Oriental scenes and fantastical decorative details – Chinese people in elaborate robes with coolie hats, long pigtails and mustaches; intricately detailed pagodas with layer upon layer of fretwork, tassels, and bells; or monkeys, lions, and elephants in costume. Our endless fascination with exotic locales gives the designs relevance even today.

Why Chinoiserie at all? Europeans’ fascination with the Far East began in Marco Polo’s day, in the thirteenth century. At a time when few people traveled the world, exotic goods such as silk fabrics, carpets and porcelain reached Europe via a trading route known as the Silk Road, which carried goods by cart and camel across the entire continent of Asia. This ancient road was a bridge connecting the major cultures of the world. China and Japan were sophisticated and complex cultures at that time, with a long history of art. (In fact, in the 8th century, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, Chinese artists were inventing Impressionism!) For wealthy Europeans, owning artifacts from the Far East was a status symbol. With these artifacts came stories from the traders of the amazing temples and pagodas they had seen and the strange costumes and appearance of the Oriental people. Cultures from Persia all the way to China were called “Oriental” by the Europeans. They made little effort to distinguish one people from another, and the fanciful designs of Chinoiserie often blend Chinese, Japanese and Persian or Indian elements. Today we know that the “Orient” at the time was really the current-day Middle East, and “Asian” is the only correct term for the peoples of the Asian continent. But because of this long-ago misnomer, it is not uncommon to hear some people still refer to Chinoiserie as “Oriental” art.

A sneek peek at some of the cursory images I'm collecting to choose examples from for the next design blurb I write for this page. I'm brushing up on details of some definitive aspects, that, when combined, render a decorating style I grew up with at home as a child called Palm Beach Regency, a.k.a Palm Beach Chic or Southern Regency.