Friday 18 January 2008

Beijing and a soft touch


I was asked to do a research for an article about fabrics to use in interior decoration.

Here is the article:


And here are a few addresses in Beijing for fabrics (click on pic to enlarge):



Of course, one of my favorite markets, the gigantic Muxiyuan Fabric Market needs to be mentioned as well. It is located in the South of Beijing, in the Fengtai District (check "Insider's Guide to Beijing" for address in Chinese). It offers an enormous choice of cotton fabrics, silk, cashmere, furs and accessories like buttons, zips, applications etc. (see photo above, cotton fabrics with cute Chinese pattern).

For the article I got inspired by lots of blogs: Absolutely Beautiful, Decor8, Design*Sponge, Girl Meets Glamour, The Style Files ... The magazine's designer choose a picture of a lampshade by Black & Spiro (Absolutely Beautiful Things), a pic from Elle Decor that I found via Girl Meets Glamour and a pic with tea towels by Skinny laMinx that I discovered via The Style Files. And merci to my French neighbours who introduced me to two of the shops I mention in the article (Fontainebleu and George).

The magazine I am writing for changed the name in January. Until December 2007 it was the well-known Tbjhome and was distributed together with That's Beijing. The magazine's new name is urbane. The people and the layout are the same. But urbane's 44,000 free monthly copies are distributed separately now. In future they want to cover not only Beijing but also Shanghai and other big Chinese cities.

4 comments:

Vilijonkka said...

Ooh, I cannot wait to get there (we'll move in February), as craftsman I'll go crazy if the quality as well good as design is beautiful... In our quick 3-day visit before Xmas all I found was "silk" (polyester) and "cotton" (rayon). I got a bit sad, but maybe there is hope if I keep in mind your addresslist.

An Aesthete's Lament said...

The fabrics are wonderful. I wish I could see them in real life.

design dna said...

excellent! i will check them ALL.

R. Schwendeman said...

This is a good article - dunno how I missed it. Great photos too. Its funny - we just assisted a design client in the states with an order of various silks and had to take them through the process of understanding the various grades and their silk content. Sometimes its really hard to see the differences. One of our staff said "hey, we should put our experience on the blog since other design customers have been asking for silk rolls as well." So... the end result is we have an article coming out on own blog about Chinese antique furniture and interior design sometime next week, so check it out. Its interesting that I stumble upon this posting at the same time. May reference your article when we do... Keep up the good work!

Roger@ ACF

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