Seashell Decor Is Everywhere Right Now—Here's How to Decorate With It
On my last vacation, to the Bahamas, I repacked an entire suitcase to bring back a particularly peachy conch shell approximately the size of a lap dog. Walk into any room in my home and you’re guaranteed to find a tray, bowl, or other vessel of seashells on some shelf. So you can imagine my delight at this year’s Paris Design Week, where the Maison&Objet fair and the city’s design scene were awash in oceanic motifs. That’s right, seashell decor (and other accents featuring coral, sea glass, fish, and the like) are officially in.
To launch its newest collection, the hip French design studio Uchronia presented a veritable underwater wonderland dubbed "Stolen Objects from the Sea." Octopus-shaped lamps dangled from the ceiling above a room in which every surface was covered in seascape sculptures by the artist Antoine Billore, with whom Uchronia also collaborated on several furniture pieces that appear to have shells, barnacles, and coral growing out of them. The final touch? A French version of The Little Mermaid's “Under the Sea” playing over the speakers.
At Maison&Objet, one of the world’s largest expositions of furniture and design that takes place just outside Paris city limits, throngs of design lovers gathered to peruse the shelves of Objets de Curiosité, which were lined with backlit pieces of bleached white coral. A few aisles over, the German studio Klaus Dupont presented totems of fish, shells, and stone, topped with waving feathers of flame red coral.
Back in the city, the studio of Jim Thompson was draped with the latest launch of the Tony Duquette collection earlier this year: On the most prominent wall is a maximalist trompe l'oeil cabinet of curiosities, featuring shelves bearing seashells, coral, and other motifs. For its design, Tony Duquette's successor Hutton Wilkinson recreated Duquette's own shelves at Dawnridge, his iconic California home. Stateside, at The Philadelphia Show this spring, Diana H. Bittel and Earle Vandekar both drew much attention for two shell-encrusted grandfather clocks, whose motifs recall traditional sailor's valentines (3D collages of shells which sailors crafted for their loved ones while on long stints at sea).
So what’s driving the obsession with the underwater? Uchronia's Julien Sebban makes the case that this obsession with the underwater is more than just aesthetic. "In a world where everything is digital, we use nature and the skill of the human hand to warn of the consequences of our actions on marine ecosystems and the death of traditional skills," says the designer in the description of his show.
Belgian studio Ostrea's latest line of terrazzo, also presented at Paris Design Week, is made from crushed shells and billed as an eco-friendly alternative to plastic and other non-natural materials. Dutch manufacturer Zuiver launched the new "Ocean chair" made entirely from ocean-bound plastic waste.
In the museum world, shells are having a moment, too: Many of the posters advertising "Les Choses," an exhibition at the Louvre exploring the history of still life, feature a dramatic arrangement of three seashells against a shadowy background. At the city's buzziest new hotel, Château Voltaire—opened last year by Thierry Gillier, founder of Zadig & Voltaire—the name of the bar is La Coquille d'Or, or, "the Golden Shell," in reference to the shell motif adorning the 16th-century building's façade.
Paris may be the epicenter of the look, but it hardly stops there. “You want seashells, you go to Greece,” proclaimed the artist Dionysios, whose most recent work was an installation among ocean rocks on the coastline in Greece, his home country. Indeed, with the new Athens Design Forum (launched in 2021) and an explosion of post-Covid travel to the Greek islands, many creatives are doing just that. The trick is to leave a little extra room in your suitcase so you can pack up a few to bring home.
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