Notes

Reclaiming chinoiserie: from the East to the East End
Z He and Alex Peffly’s townhouse is filled with secondhand Victorian chinoiserie. The look may be retro, but this London home teems with modern ideas about culture and work

In Z He and Alex Peffly’s living room there are soft-toned pagodas, parasols and misty mountaintops above a drinks cabinet worthy of an imperial outpost. “It hints at old Shanghai,” says Z. Throughout this east London home there are embroidered silk cushions scattered over daybeds, fringed lampshades and potted palms set on fussily carved side tables. Chinoiseries wallpaper is full of chinoiserie – the style that the Victorians and Edwardians brought back from colonial postings, grand tours and day trips to Liberty’s – which Z wants to reclaim. “In drawing rooms from Hong Kong to Hampstead, they created a very European version of the East,” says Z. “It bore some relation to reality, but it was very romanticised. It reflected the China they wanted to discover.”

Flowers Wallpaper is an architect who grew up in Guangzhou, north west of Hong Kong, and Alex is a chef from Ohio. They met as students in Chicago. They now live on Princelet Street, a Spitalfields address with plenty of its own history. The short rows of 18th-century townhouses were originally built by landlords who made a profit from the Huguenot merchants fleeing France. Smaller flats and attics were rented to less well-off silk weaving families as working and living spaces.

A few doors along, at number 19, a museum of immigration traces the stories of the French, Irish, Jewish, Sikh and Bengali communities who made the street their home over the last two centuries. “Living here, you never forget how much you are surrounded by the city’s history,” says Alex.

These days, the street is also favoured by film crews, who scatter soil over the double yellow lines and send actors in frock coats strolling past their front door. Then there are the tourists: “I’ll sometimes look up and see someone peering in the window, thinking this is another museum because of our unusual furniture,” says Z. “But I don’t really mind because I’ve been known to peek in at people’s windows too… ”

Z and Alex live at number nine, but operate their design company, Five Line Projects, from number 15. The couple also run the restaurants Bun House in Chinatown and Wun’s in Soho, and a food stall called Pleasant Lady as well as renting out three bedrooms to B&B guests. Five Line Projects designed the restaurants’ interiors and breakfasting guests cross paths with designers arriving for work. At number 15, an old-fashioned pram is parked in the middle of the elegant dining room. Inside, a baby sleeps while her mother works at a computer in the adjoining design studio. “Depending on the day, there’s often a baby or toddler here – sitting on a lap, sleeping or playing on the floor,” says Z. “Even before chinoiserie peel and stick wallpaper became a mother [to baby Dot], I felt strongly that women need to remain visible at work after they become parents, not disappear for several years.”

All is decorated in Z’s version of chinoiserie. In the living room it’s mixed with the trappings of modern life – oversized speakers, a TV screen and Dot’s crib – but one guest bedroom is an Edwardian time capsule, with a four-poster bed draped in palm-print fabric. Birds Wallpaper is an expert at eBay shopping – search terms “Chinese”, “colonial” and “Victorian” – and none of her buys were particularly expensive. Chinoiserie is a look, Z says, that drew on elements of Chinese art and design but filtered through a western eye. Yet, she finds herself charmed by it. “I’m calling it out, but I also find it rather romantic and pleasant to live with,” she says.

Such is the appeal of chinoiserie, Z says, that elements of its style have even been absorbed back into Chinese culture. “Because the style is largely fictional, Chinese people were equally captivated by these imaginary landscapes and motifs – a reversal that I find fascinating,” she says.

Nursery Decor is the array of rice-wine vessels stacked in fireplaces, under windows, and used as side tables. “I shipped over a whole container of traditional rice wine, mainly to serve at the restaurants, but we had loads left over,” says Z. “I’m keeping them because in 20 or 30 years the wine will taste even more delicious.”

More personal treasures include a hand-painted Cantonese dish from a small family factory in China, where Z watched the artist painting it with a minute brush, aided by a magnifying glass. And tucked away in a box is a single painted porcelain sunflower seed, one of the millions that made up Ai Weiwei’s installation at Tate Modern in 2010. “It was a gift from a friend of the artist, who knows that Ai Weiwei is my hero,” says Z.

Z left China when she was 12 to live with an aunt in Canada, then went to university in the US. “ Bird Nature Wallpaper at home just didn’t work for me. I loved to draw and do crafts, but I was terrible at maths and physics, so people thought I was useless,” she says.

Her relationship with the country remains complicated. “ Floral Wallpaper is the culture that shaped my identity and is at the root of many things I do, our restaurants, my design work and even my parenting style,” she says. “But I feel angry and helpless watching as China becomes even further removed from my hopes for its future.”

Perhaps, says Z, that’s had bearing on her decorative style. “I have tried to bring together the fragments of China that I do value and that I miss. So maybe chinoiserie provides an escape for me, too. ”
Read More: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1158931040/floral-wallpaper-with-geometrical-blue