Shabby Chic Do-It-Yourself

What comes to your mind when someone asks you to describe your grandmother's furniture? Would it be Victorian-style chairs with garish red, velvet fabric, heavy draperies that barely admitted the green, glaring light of the winter sun, dark wood carvings, overly frilly doilies, boring paintings of flowers? In your mind, do these memories of Victorian furniture come in a handy Victorian frame too? A heavy, purple Queen Anne sofa, perhaps, and oh, please don't sit there with that sticky candy cane in your hand! Or possibly you recall a dark cherry coffee table so menacing that you can almost hear it saying "how many times do I have to tell you not to put your feet on that?!" ("I didn't mean to," you want to reply, "I was just so lost in the tall sofa that my feet had nowhere else to go.") Would you buy any of these pieces at a furniture store now? "No way!" you say. "They're too overbearing and impractical and frankly, they give me nightmares."

Yes, that would seem to be the case, but think again. These heavy-looking and claustrophobic pieces of furniture that thankfully vanished into evanescence decades ago are now making a charming and sentimental come-back through the creative and extremely accessible Shabby Chic decorating style. The term hatched from a magazine article in "The World of Interiors" over 20 years ago and has been popularized by Rachel Ashbury, author of the 1996 interior design book, "Shabby Chic." Ashbury owns the design company which works in tandem with Target to create their line of "Simply Shabby Chic" home decor.