Spicy Serenity Tropical Decor Has Been Reincarnated In A Quieter Form
Trend tracker Michele Lamb calls it “Island Tropical.”
Home & Garden TV personality and author Chris Casson Madden dubs it “Forbidden Fruit.”
Whatever name you give it, there’s a design storm brewing that promises to transform the stereotypes of “tropical” into a fresh look for interiors from Miami to Malibu.
Unlike the cliche tropical style, which relied heavily on wicker, bright colors and a touch of kitsch, this reincarnation is sprinkled with enough popular mid-range colors, dark wood and eclectic elements to work almost anywhere in the country.
Lamb, who publishes The Trend Curve newsletter, said it was about two years ago when she first forecast Island Tropical would be the next hot design trend. Interior designers have been creating rooms in this style for about a year, but it’s just starting to trickle down to the folks who do decorating themselves.
Island Tropical is an offshoot of the global, ethnic looks that have been so popular, Lamb said.
“It’s more global and has elements that work with Asian, the East Indies and British Colonial furnishings,” she said in a phone interview from her office in Minneapolis. “The other factor is a growing interest in Cuba.”
Madden agrees. As a consultant for Bassett furniture, she recently created a publication for the company’s Idea Club called Island Inspired.
“In the next century design is going to have a Zen-like serenity, but with this we are going to need some spice,” Madden said. “That spicy ingredient is Island Tropical. I call it Forbidden Fruit because its influence comes from the places that we as Baby Boomers were forbidden to travel to when we were young - particularly Cuba and French Vietnam.”
The growing interest in Cuba is being reflected in some recent furniture introductions such as Pennsylvania House’s Old Havana Collection and the Havana segment of Thomasville’s Ernest Hemingway Collection.
But you don’t have to go out and buy all new furniture. You can keep the overstuffed, casual-looking rooms with chairs-and-a-half and comfy ottomans that we have fallen in love with the past few years. Just add some “spice” with influences from Cuba, Japan, the Caribbean, Vietnam, the Philippines and Bali.
The bottom line: Tropical kitsch is gone. Island sophistication and comfort are in.
“We aren’t doing the big, banana leaf wallpaper this time around,” Madden said. “This look has a quietude, a serenity, the Zen influence of Asia and the islands. It’s not the hot, hot, hot island style. It’s much more cool, clean and serene.”
In fact, the roots of the trend could be traced back to the 1993-‘94 International Home Furnishings Markets in High Point, N.C., where several manufacturers introduced the Raj or British Colonial look. The key elements included intricately carved mahogany four-poster beds; Planter’s chairs with sloped backs, caning and wide teak arms big enough to set down a drink; paddle fans; white linen and mosquito netting.
But Raj can be deadly boring if that’s all you use in a room, according to Jennifer Garrigues, who has created a reputation for her use of this global tropical look. Raj, she maintains, needs to be offset with richer fabrics such as chenille, cotton slipcovers and accents such as a great Asian bench, batiks, an elephant painting, old pots and kilns.
“The tropical look is becoming a little more stylized, a little more controlled and a little more sophisticated,” she said. Garrigues, who has used what we now call “Island Tropical” in her home as well as in clients’ homes and in rooms she has created for the Red Cross Designer Showhouse in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I think it means cleaning up your act,” she says. “Not minimalist, but much less cluttered.” For instance, putting an architectural object or a vase with tropical leaves on top of a beautiful wrought iron console.
Her taboos: No fluffy rugs. No bad reproductions of Persian rugs. No navy and no dark red.
“I think the look should include a mixture of cottons, textured batiks, more mossy greens and mossy yellows with a touch of red,” Garrigues added. “It’s a much quieter, serene, less sharp look.”
Interior designer Dale Miller of Daring by Design in Boca Raton, Fla. says she began looking for an alternative after her clients began to tire of the old tropical look - peach and seafoam with accents of flamingos and palm trees.
“They wanted something comfortable and casual, but they couldn’t put a name in it,” Miller said.
She found the answer by mixing British Colonial and Indonesian furniture with Asian and other ethnic accents.
Island Tropical, she says, can be as simple as flanking an Indonesian antique chest with a pair of Indonesian teak chairs, as she did for a client recently. To make the chairs comfortable, she added pillows covered in a chenille tapestry fabric with an elephant motif in sage, cinnabar and ochre and a pair of footstools covered in a sage and gold fabric. The global look was enhanced with giraffe prints and wooden statues.
Accessories are also important. A still life of a Thai Buddha, a collection of medicine pots from central Java, old opium pipes and a pair of ostrich eggs from South Africa decorate the top of a 100-year-old silk wood chest. A silk rug from China hangs on the wall. And the family room features an African mask on the wall and a primitive sculpture of a man from Sumatra.
This ability to mix a little of this and a little of that means no two interpretations have to be alike - a plus in this era of self-expression.
“You don’t have to feel that you have to do a whole room of this,” trend tracker Lamb said. “You can have fun with it and make it really 1950s or be very serious.
“What I see more than anything is we are not talking about hula dancers and a grass skirt as a decorative accessory. We are talking about candles shaped like a bamboo pole, and that’s a very different thing.”