Blenheim Suite Furnishing and Balloon Chairs...

Last week we finalised and placed the order for all the furniture for Willowbrook. We had been working on the designs for about a year. For much of the house we have designed Chippendale styled furniture to match our own antique pieces. Much of the design was taken directly from Chippendale's Director. 

The pieces are being handmade out of sustainable mahogany. We had to search around many different manufacturers before finding one whose workmanship was passable for authentic period carpentry and whose carving was suitable skillful; but who also had ethically sourced mahogany. There is a one year lead in time for a house lot of furniture, so we had to place the order by the end of October to ensure it arrives on time October next year.

One of the less formal and more fun pieces we chose was a balloon chair for the Blenheim Suite.It will be upholstered in a tuquoise silk to match the Zoffany Manchu wallpaper and the custom designed bed stead, similar to the examples below.

Below: Zoffany's Manchu Turquoise Wallpaper. One can see the pomegranates in this swatch, but not the crimson birds which are very jolly indeed.

The bedstead is in the Chippendale Chinese style, with a gilded bedhead with birds carved into the surround. The birds tie in with the wallpaper and are also replicated in an oriental Chippendale-styled mirror for the suite.

Above: The bed head. What is shown in gray undercoat will be gilded, and the upholstery will be in a Chinese silk to compliment the wallpaper.

Below: Detail of the foot of the bed. Again, the upholstery will be in the same silk as the headboard.

Below: The Oriental Chippendale styled mirror.

It was great fun to design our own furniture. We printed out the entire director along with hundreds of photos of furniture we liked and then cut and pasted all the details together to create the perfect pieces of furniture. The carpentrty firm we are using has been very supportive and onboard with what we are doing, which is also very helpful. And the ever patient Robyn of Aureum Imports and McPherson Architecture has coordinated the whole project and helped us pull it together on time. Many thanks to her.

More Balloon Chairs...

Photos from Tumblr

The Blenheim Suite: The finer details....

Many of the great Georgian houses of Britain had a Chinese room. The Blenheim suite is going to be our Chinese room.

Chinoiserie, from 'chinois' the French for Chinese, was a style inspired by art and design from China, Japan and other Asian countries. In the 18th century porcelain, silk and lacquerware imported from China and Japan were extremely fashionable. This led many British designers and craftsmen to imitate Asian designs and to create their own fanciful versions of the East. The style was at its height from 1750 to 1765.

Above: The old Silk Road which stretched between Europe and the Far East. Chinese porcelain and silk flooded to the West after China eased its restrictions on foreign trade in 1684.

The Chinese Room in Claydon House has the most elaborate Chinoiserie interior surviving in Britain. It was designed in 1769 by Luke Lightfoot. Above each door is a pagoda motif supported by Chinese figures.

Oriental faces also appear among the flowers around the chimney-piece. The most remarkable part of the room is the tea alcove which is painted with a latticework design and covered in an abundance of Chinoiserie details.

Hand painted chinese wallpaper was also de rigeur...

Today there are many good quality machine manufactured chinoiserie wallpapers...

Here is the [limited] range of chinoiserie wallpapers, in duck egg blue, that we've found so far...

Above and Below: Colefax and Fowler Chinese Toile Pattern in aqua colour, with swatch of matching fabric. Lovely Chinese theme, but it has only 2 colours - beige and blue.

Below: Colefax and Fowler Rousillon pattern in aqua colour, with a complimenting fabric swatch. I like the metallic gold paint of the blue background.
In the full pattern the branches form a diamond shaped lattice.

Below: 3 Fabric options

Below: The Colefax and Fowler Marchwood pattern in aqua colour. I like the magnolias. They add some colour to the duck egg blue, but are not explicitly Chinese.

Ideally we would like a duck egg blue background with a more colourful foreground pattern, which was particularly Chinese in its motifs.

Which one of the above 3 papers do you like the most???

The Blenheim suite will also showcase much of our Chinese porcelain and furniture.
Here are some ideas of the style we are plumbing for from other houses:

Chinoiserie Laquerware...

Orientally inspired screens...

A mixture of 17-18th century gilded furniture

Oriental Mirrors

Sconces with Chinese porcelain

For more inspiration for the Chinoiserie lovers out there, check out this excellent blog... Chinoiserie Chic