Home & Decor Singapore pays tribute to three decades of design with a look back on its most interesting features over the years.
This week, we look at the home of Dolores and Henri Chollet, a French couple who have resided set up their home in Singapore for over nine years.
For designer Dolores Chollet, the challenge was two-fold: how best to keep the open, airy character of the contemporary California-style house with its soaring, A-frame roof, sunny atrium gardens, huge picture windows and glass block walls, yet make it more cosy – scaled for comfort, intimacy and efficiency, rather than architectural bravura.
A collection of antique mirror-embroidered Rajasthani textiles hangs above a carefully-edited arrangement with a translucent theme – the lucite table holds an egg-shaped lamp, brass and pink jade cranes from Mauritius (also egg-shaped) and pink jade grapes.
“I hate houses where you step through the doorway right into the living room. It’s too abrupt,” declares the designer. So a sense of arrival was created by closing off two superfluous openings in the wall with plywood and vertical blinds. The ‘wall’ created now backdrops a lively old Indian carving of a running horse and en elegant brass book stand.
Toning shades of misty lilac and sand upholstery from Manuel Canovas were used in the living room. Mrs Chollet’s design firm, Idees and Decoration, hold the local agency for the world-renowned French textile house and her home is a sumptuous showcase for their timelessly chic fabrics.
A graceful tablescape of exotic white orchids echoes the eyes of the peacocks’ tails in the painting. Like a lot of the plants and flowers in the house, real and fake were blended to achieve a highly stylised ‘blooming’ that is rare in nature. All fake plants from Tree Creations at Forum Galleria.
Instant impact: On entering the house, the eye is immediately engaged by a soaring art gallery (once a picture window) of vibrant, colourful paintings at the end of the foyer. Mr Chollet once paid a short visit to Haiti, and came back laden with this collection of 13 “Native” or primitive paintings of Voodoo, pastoral and native market scenes.
In essence, the Chollets see their home as a shell, and their understated décor as a unifying canvas for their ever-growing collections.