Trials and tribulations of home decorating
Print Edition
WHEN Shanghai resident Luo Xinan was jarringly awakened at 7:30am by the racket of pounding and drilling, she sighed and said to herself, “It’s that time of year again.”
Indeed, residential buildings around the city are awash with the noise of interior decoration as new residents move into apartments or existing residents decide they want a change of surroundings.
Luo has lived in her apartment block in Yangpu District for nearly 30 years. Not new or fancy, the 20-story building has nine apartments on each floor. Quite shabby most of them, in her opinion. But shabbiness doesn’t stop people from wanting to buy flats here in Shanghai’s booming real estate market. New residents are still pouring in.
The problem is that everyone wants to redecorate before moving in.
“People just love to do interior decoration in the summer because it’s easier to get paint to dry and fumes to dispel,” Luo says. “But for me, this season is a nightmare because of all the constant racket.”
To Chinese people, decorating homes is almost as important as buying them. Often new apartments come as empty shells. No flooring. No paint on the walls. No wiring or plumbing.
Turning an environment like that into a homey place can be a stressful endeavor for couples. Deciding how an apartment should look can cause discord in even the best of relationships.
Hearing about couples breaking up or even getting divorced because of disputes over flooring, paint colors, curtains, furnishings and apartment layout isn’t all that uncommon.
Ding Dang, a professional interior decorator in Shagnhai, says she has dealt with countless cases of couples coming to serious blows while trying to fit out their apartments.
“It is all about personalities and if people in a relationship are willing to compromise,” she says. “Complicating matters, the parents of young couples often intervene too much, adding to stress levels.”
Ding says one of the most extreme cases she dealt with involved a husband’s mother who insisted on controlling every aspect during the outfitting of the young couple’s new home. She took control of the style of flooring, the color of the walls and the pattern of the curtains.
The wife had her own opinions but found herself up against an aggressive mother-in-law who told her, “This is where my son is going to live, and I have to make sure that my son is comfortable in everything.”
The exasperated wife turned to her husband for support but was just met with the reply, “Well, she is my mother after all. We should always honor our elders.”
The newlywed wife filed for divorce soon after, Ding says.
People engulfed in the stress and frustration of redecorating can find a safety valve online.
On zhihu.com, a Quora-like website in China, a recent post captured a lot of attention.
The question of the post was: “What is the ugliest inner decoration that you have ever seen?” The replies were a outpouring of complaints. In the past several months, there have been more than 1,670 replies, many of which have been reposted to social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat.
The most popular reply was from an anonymous user who complained about the wedding apartment her mother decorated for her. The bedroom was dark pink, and garish bright paper flowers were hung above the bed. People commented that the bedroom looked like “a cheap love hotel room.”
The second most popular reply showed a set of furniture that suggested a love affair with Microsoft Windows. The pattern of the Windows 7 logo was printed on the cabinet doors, and the bedside lamp had the same shape and color combination as the logo.
“It seems my parents’ generation loves to combine ancient Chinese style with Baroque,” commented a user with the screen name Da Yang. “That creates the ugliest interior decor.”
Ding says interior decorating causes so many problems because there are so many choices, so many things to buy and so many opinions about what looks good.
For a common inner decoration project, people usually turn to companies like Homemart and B&Q, signing work contracts with them. The companies designate an interior designer and a construction team to the clients. Clients can either choose to buy the materials themselves or trust that job to the construction team, who are often migrant workers.
Doors and windows need to be installed. Flooring needs to be laid. Walls need to be painted. Wiring and plumbing must be done. Shelving, closets and cabinets need to be built. Sinks, toilets and bathing facilities must be chosen. The whole process usually takes three to six months, according to the size of the home and the amount of decoration ordered.
“From my experience, many people get very stressed, anxious and frustrated during this process,” Ding says. “They often worry about the quality of the workmen and if everything is being done correctly. They worry about the cost. It’s easy to get irritated during the lengthy process.”
Ding says when a couple ends up fighting too much over the style of the decor, she sends them a picture of Mei Ling’s Palace in Nanjing, capital city of Jiangsu Province. It shows the gaudy pink bathroom in the villa, which was the former residence of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei Ling.
“I will tell the couple that the very pink, Western-style bathroom must be Soong Mei Ling’s style, and apparently Chiang Kai-shek didn’t have any say in it,” Ding says.
“If a former leader of a country can make compromises with his wife on home decoration, why can’t you?”
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