Ghost Chairs

Three hundred of Philippe Starck's transparent Ghost chairs sparkled under chandeliers in front of this year's Interior Design Show in Toronto. Forget office-style stacking seats. This was function with a heady dose of fashion."That chair is the perfect expression of what's going on right now," said Calgary-based interior designer Monica Stevens, who had flown into town for the recent four-day event. "It's a bergère, but it's acrylic. It's a sign of the times. It's the minimal shape, but it's luxurious."Call it nouveau traditional. But there's nothing staid about this new interior design aesthetic. It's about reinterpreting tradition from a contemporary perspective: A Louis XVI chair becomes thoroughly modern in clear polycarbonate; a wallpapered den looks perfectly 21st- century with a wallpapered ceiling, and an otherwise low-key sitting room reverberates anew with lemon walls.David Shah, trend expert with international publications such as Textile View and Viewpoint, called the mood "glambaroque" in a recent Newsday article. "It's an eclectic mixture of colour, pattern, shape, material. . . . It's about clutter. It's about putting lots of things together; it can be rococo, baroque, mixed with something personal. It's full of surprises. It really harks back to the excesses of the 19th-century boudoir. It's a new smore: http://www.dexigner.com/jump/news4474.html