Combining French Beds And Shabby Chic Furniture For A Unique Bedroom Style

By Author: Daniel Crow
Total Articles: 403
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The French style is one that will probably never go out of fashion. It exudes quality and elegance at all times and is the perfect look for any room in the house, not just the bedroom, where it has been popularised in Western countries since the fall of the French monarchy in the early 1800s.

Much French furniture design is concerned with comfort and luxury, with many of its most famed pieces taking the form of heavily upholstered beds, couches and chairs whose frames are often intricately carved out of various kinds of woods and then painted over in pale pastel colours, rather than left in its natural state. If you’ve ever been to the palace of Versailles or round an English country house (many of which took their design inspiration from the French), you’ll already have an idea in your head about what a room based around French furniture looks like.

However, this French style has undergone something of a subversion in recent times. Since the 1980s, the shabby chic movement has been a major influence in design, adopted by bohemians and artists who cannot afford brand new furniture and are forced to buy second-hand ...
... from charity shops. These pieces often show signs of distress and wear and tear, but it is thought that these deformities add character, and the shabby chic style has grown so popular that companies and designers now produce brand new pieces with these nicks and scratches created in the factory rather than picked up over decades of use. This new style lends itself well to French pieces as many people imagine that pieces in the French style look more authentic and offer the room a slightly more unusual effect if they have been aged a significant amount.

As previously mentioned, shabby chic furniture can now be purchased brand new, but there’s nothing stopping you from sourcing your own pieces as cheaply as possible (whether they’re brand new or second-hand) and distressing them yourself. Much of the time, all this requires is a quick sanding-down across the piece’s wooden surfaces to scratch away the paint and reveal the natural wood underneath. If you’ve bought an armoire or wardrobe, you can also swap the knobs around to create a mismatched effect. Whatever furniture you have and whatever it’s made out of, there are always methods of distressing it so that it looks as authentic as possible – that’s what instructional videos on YouTube were made for!

However, you might ultimately decide that you’d prefer shiny new things rather than pieces that look like they came out of the factory in the 1800s, and there are a multitude of options available in this case. With French style as popular as ever, many designers and retailers concentrate solely on creating furniture that brings the time of Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV to mind, such as French beds, armoires, gilded and ornate full-length mirrors and chaise longues to lounge upon with a book and a coffee. This is all without getting into basic things like wallpaper and floors. Take advantage of websites online for inspiration and education into the way in which these things fit together to comprise your perfect French room.

For more information visit http://www.crownfrenchfurniture.co.uk/