Loui Loui (longest blog ever!)

Good Morning friends!

Happy Monday to you!

Last week I had a great lunch meeting with Mary from Carnegie Fabrics and one of the fabulous things she showed us was the lastest pattern for Xorel called Artisan Fabrics.

This fabric (that you will see in the last layout) inspired us to recover two of our lovely King Louis chairs....

So...what's a King Louis chair?? Well..first we need to figure out which Louis we are talking about....

Lets first talk about King Louis XV. (1723-1774). His style was French Rococo.

His style of furniture exemplified the almost feminine quality of the era...men and women both wore the powdered wigs..the lace and the satin.

This was a life of leisure centered around active social gatherings.

These guys had the Parisian hotels instead of the giant palaces.

So just like today we have downsized our living..they did the same thing back then.

It's like having all this furniture that you once put in your mansion and making it fit into your two bedroom apartment. oh the fun of it all.

So Louis XV's style catered to the newer and much smaller living quarters.

Furniture became more graceful and comfortable and eventually smaller and more proportioned to the new smaller rooms.

The heaviness and pretentiousness started to disappear.

Something that I did not know that I just found out is that THIS is when the Window Seat was invented!

Well, we should thank Louis and most definitely his mistress Madame de Pompadour.

She was the one that promoted the artistic advancement at Versailles.

Ok... so that brings us to the next Louis...Louis XVI who ascended the throne in 1774. (1754-1793).... see below

This Louis brought with him the Early Neoclassical style of furniture.

This brought with it straight lines and symmetry.

Rooms became more rectangular and angular.

This was considered a return to the "purity" of the arts of Rome.

The pastel tones and haziness of the Rococo style was now replaced with sharp colors and chiaroscuro. (see bottom)

Even bedrooms changed drastically.

Beds became smaller in size and the headboards and foot boards had canopies and were suspended overhead.

The beds were placed against the wall rather than perpendicular to the wall.. they were tucked away in alcoves.

Basically they did what we do in a kids room when we want to create more space.

We stick the bed against the wall and add a bunch of pillows. ha!

These designers were trying to recreate the Roman Villas.

These days, we take Rococo and Neoclassical to an entirely new level....we dress them up with bright prints..we paint them...or we strip them completely bare like the Louis Ghost chair below.

For us, at Within...you know we love WHITE.... so we have decided to paint our chairs White.

They are not originals..and the wood is not in very good shape.. so Paint is our decision!

Our plan is this:

We have a pair of medallion-back French Louis XVI style armless chairs.

Both chairs have round tapered and fluted legs with thimble feet and rosette blocks at the four corners of the seat rail.

We will paint them white and with our new Xorel fabric it will be stunning!!!! We cannot wait!

The fabric itself is genius... it is super cleanable and self healing.

Yup self healing.

I would sit here and write more about it..but I think this blog is the longest one I've ever had!!!

I definitely encourage you to check out Carnegie's website and learn more about Xorel (see bottom of post).

For now, we leave you!

Hope this was educational for you! It really was for us!!!!

Cheers to Monday and all the Louis in History!

~within

P.S.

** Chiaroscuro (, ; Italian for light-dark) in art is characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition.
It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for using contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects such as the human body.

*** To learn more about Xorel, it's process and design, click HERE for an informative pdf file.