Philippe Starck's Transparent Ghost Chairs

Philippe Starcks Transparent Ghost Chairs
Three hundred of Philippe Starck's transparent Ghost chairs sparkled under chandeliers in front of this year's Interior Design Show in Toronto. Forget office-style stacking seats. This was function with a heady dose of fashion.

"That chair is the perfect expression of what's going on right now," said Calgary-based interior designer Monica Stevens, who had flown into town for the recent four-day event. "It's a berg�re, but it's acrylic. It's a sign of the times. It's the minimal shape, but it's luxurious."

Call it nouveau traditional. But there's nothing staid about this new interior design aesthetic. It's about reinterpreting tradition from a contemporary perspective: A Louis XVI chair becomes thoroughly modern in clear polycarbonate; a wallpapered den looks perfectly 21st- century with a wallpapered ceiling, and an otherwise low-key sitting room reverberates anew with lemon walls.

David Shah, trend expert with international publications such as Textile View and Viewpoint, called the mood "glambaroque" in a recent Newsday article. "It's an eclectic mixture of colour, pattern, shape, material. . . . It's about clutter. It's about putting lots of things together; it can be rococo, baroque, mixed with something personal. It's full of surprises. It really harks back to the excesses of the 19th-century boudoir. It's a new s