Shabby chic is a design style that celebrates the unique beauty in imperfection. It's about blending a (usually) light color palette with distressed surfaces or objects that hint at a more genteel past. It often includes overstuffed cushions, soft lines and the liberal use of floral chintz-inspired fabrics.
Shabby chic is fundamentally an eclectic design style. It borrows from multiple historical periods and mixes those disparate elements into a cohesive whole. That whole often appears vaguely romantic, somewhat muted and almost always plush and inviting. It's a style where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. It's endlessly flexible, which makes it open to broad and interesting interpretations, too.
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One new area of shabby chic design integrates modern elements with distressed, overstuffed pieces. It can be surprisingly effective at softening the appearance of ultra-modern architecture (think metal, glass and basic black) or even the cold look of a very large room. If you love shabby chic but want to tone down its feminine underpinnings with a slightly more masculine or geometric vibe, modern shabby chic may be for you.
On the next pages, let's take a look at five ways you can get shabby chic with a modern sensibility.