Reflections on Swedish Interiors – Inspired Voyage / Tara Shaw

“The city is one very long poem. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades — 30 foot columns, gloriously beautiful — double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn’t move.”

Among the contemporary contributors to New Orleans’ ever-eclectic design mix is the interior designer an antiques dealer Tara Shaw. With imports arriving regularly from her prolific European antiques jaunts and her own popular Tara Shaw MAISON line manufactured in the Crescent City and also hand carved and painted in Asia, Tara has found her niche as one of the largest antiques an furniture dealers to the South and is busy expanding her company globally.

The exterior of Tara’s chateau-style residence is messed in French eighteenth-century restraint. Here nature is tamed and a verdant green lawn surrounded by hedges, topiaries, formal sculpture and parterres leads to a lacquered door reminiscent of black onyx. The formal façade quickly dissolves, however, when Tara and her husband, Robby Walsh, welcome us as their pair of white whippets frolic like lively children around their feet. In her relaxed kitchen, filled with Italian and Swedish antiques, Tara describes how she finds her home in the city’s Uptown area to be an oasis from her international business schedule as well as a private place to put her design theories to work. “My full schedule has always been the inspiration to the ‘calming effect’ of what I want clients to experience when they come home.

The relaxed feel of well-loved Swedish antiques with original worn patinas is visually soft and pleasing to the eye an they work effortlessly with contemporary furnishings and architecture. “Tara’s love of creating a design for living that is base on layering the present over the past without compromising either one, is evident as she takes us through the house where Swedish furniture is use in each room.”

The house already had fine proportions and scale and was made to exacting standards by the previous owner. Under Tara’s eft touch, simple but powerful forms from different centuries now play in the tall sunlit rooms side by side. Swedish modern chairs in the living room by Arne Norrell, for example, offset a medieval gilt sculpture and Italian walnut veneer table. “I love Arne Norrell for his vision on a truly comfortable man-scaled chaise. His style is clean, elegant and timeless and most of all works so well with the eighteenth an nineteenth-century Swedish furniture and their classic streamline silhouettes.”

Contemporary paintings and sculpture are mixed with antiquities and painted Swedish furniture. By contrasting the patina of time with sleek modern elements, a tension is create — each enhancing the other. “I basically have had a passion for painted furniture for over two decades and the love affair with painted Swedish, for me, is that one can visually see the texture because of the use of grainy woods under the painted surface. I love contrasting these painted pieces with sleek mid-century modern in my own home as well as those of my clients.”

The upstairs takes us into a more romantic realm where the guest bedroom blends Empire restraint with Gustavian light and simplicity. Tara’s photography of s sphinx is echoed in the inscrutable sphinx and griffons in the Gustavian mirror hung on a facing wall. “In design, a mirror will always open the space an reflect other items in the room,” states Tara. “It really adds the third dimension and I always grab a room by the lighting — it is one of the first things I notice. All spaces need a unique anchor an so I say, ‘Let there be light!” A soft white leather hie rug on the wide-planked floor, creamy white draperies and being all give the room a further Nordic air and make a great contrast to the textured painted antiques and rich browns of the room’s mahogany bed and leather chair.

Tara takes a cue from seventeenth an eighteenth-century faux panels in her showroom located at the edge of the garden and warehouse districts on Camp Street in New Orleans. Wood paneling in Europe during the Baroque period and the Enlightenment was all the rage as both a practical and attractive way of insulating a room and hiding irregularities. At the height of the style, these boiserie were sumptuously carved, painted and designed by master decorative architects and artisans and it is a joy to report that examples of these remarkable rooms can still be found throughout many fine palaces and manor homes of Europe. In Sweden, elaborately carved wood paneling was very costly, reserved for the nobility, and so canvases painted in faux paneling were use instead.

The walls in Tara’s showroom are painted in soft hues of white, san and orchards depicting delicate paneling inspire by a library in Italy and referencing eighteenth-century Sweden. Two massive antique Italian bookcases with vellum volumes an mounted shells line the entry room where Tara’s reproduction Swedish tables and chairs from her Tara Shaw MAISON line invite clients to sit and browse her extensive catalog of 260 reproduction pieces.

Realizing that fine antiques were being exhausted from the market, Tara started her MAISON line of reproduction furniture to supply a need for beautiful antique forms. Working closely with manufacturers and artisans in New Orleans, India, and China, Tara’s furniture line is known for its exacting attention to patina and detail. Reflecting on who in Swedish design an home furnishings she admires and would love to speak with, Tara states that “My conversation would be with Ingvar Kampard, the founder of IKEA. Beauty begets beauty an I am of the opinion that beautiful furnishings are not just for the 1 percent. There is something universally significant about a man’s home being his castle. Ingvar’s work wide vision of attainability of furniture and accessories that are made in price ranges for all to enjoy is being aired.” This is one of the key philosophies behind Tara sharing her extraordinary antiques collection as reproductions, to enable the rare form to carry on and be enjoyed by all — proving, like most everything in New Orleans, to be a very good idea indeed.