INTERIORS / The Empire sits back: Style Revivals: 2 Colonial: A rattan day bed and a rosewood planter's chair can evoke the languid elegance of our imperial past, writes Caroline McGhie, minus the insects that plagued the real thing

IT WAS ONE of the early signals that the colonial style was becoming serious. David

and Janet Green, who were running their young coir and sisal import company in a small way from the sitting-room floor, received a message on their answerphone: 'It is David Hicks. Himself.'

Indeed, for them it was like a call from God. For once Hicks, the high priest of interior designers, started spreading coir and sisal around the floors of expensive town and country houses, many others would follow. Hicks says he used sisal years earlier, but he gives credit to the Greens for making products from the former colonies more accessible than ever before.

Like most interior designers, he is not shy about scoring points off others, and is precise to the year about when he first used the stuff. 'It was 1958 and I did a Palladian temple which I rented in East Anglia. But then I used traditional Suffolk rush matting in the drawing room.' And did it raise eyebrows? 'Yes. Of course. Everything I do causes a stir.'

The fact that such alternative carpeting from Third World sources (coir is made from the husks of coconuts, sisal is a fibre used in rope-making) was accepted by the upper end of the market first gave its image a certain class. It was seen as understated and international rather than cheap and ethnic. It managed to look unpretentiously natural and environmentally sensitive. It somehow implied that the owner shopped and thought globally.

The Greens have just launched Crucial Trading Post, a sister company to the one that deals with the carpets, to sell storm lamps and colonial furniture so people can summon up the age of memsahibs, chota pegs and punkahs in their sitting rooms. The Greens say that all their friends with houses in Clapham and rectories in the country want just this sort of thing.

The time is right because people are no longer racked with guilt about buying things from the Third World, as they were in the Seventies. Call it the 'Oxfam factor'. To buy highly-crafted hand-made objects now is to help create jobs rather than exploit the under- privileged. Nostalgia for the Raj dovetails neatly with the desire to be ethnically chic.

'We have ended up with this odd collection of objects,' said David Green. 'This is not the grandest furniture you will find in India. It is everyday, but it has the panache you get from the collision of two cultures. It is much more carved than you would find in Europe. It is also quite dotty, some of it, but rather fun. It's an individualistic style, a departure from the country house look, and jolly pretty.'

A new book, The Romance of Colonial Style by Tricia Foley (Thames & Hudson, pounds 19.95), takes a close look at the images we have inherited of colonial life, from the polo in the morning to the drink at sundown at the club (carpeted in sisal). Ms Foley does not delve into the history of the Empire; her interest is in style for style's sake. There is a recognised props list that you could tick off as you would the contents of an old trunk: wicker-wrapped flasks and picnic baskets, mahogany campaign chests, four-poster beds wrapped in mosquito netting, silver tea services, paisley prints. In a sense these were props, with which those trying to establish themselves in a strange country surrounded themselves; everyday things the British felt they needed to lead a 'normal' life, not so different from what one might have found in a Berkshire farmhouse.

Such things were ordered from the catalogues of the Army & Navy Stores or Messrs Silver & Co, and shipped out agonisingly slowly to Africa and India: tents with bathrooms and verandas, folding furniture and trunks. That feeling of constant travel through a world of unbleached cottons and muslins has an immense pull on the imagination today, especially among those who are sick of plastic and package tours.

The grand scale of travel in those days was described wonderfully by Emily Eden, who joined her brother in India in 1835, when he was made Governor.

The trains of servants and animals stretched 10 miles. 'Inside each tent were our beds - one leaf of a dining table and three cane chairs. Our . . . camel-trunks were brought in, and in about half an hour the nazir came to say all, with our books, dressing cases & c, be carried off to be put under the care of the sentry, as nothing is safe.'

The great appeal of the style today is that it conveys with it a certain worldly wisdom, a tolerance, and it implies that you are the type to travel long-haul rather than short-haul. The fact that the modern safari, as organised by Abercrombie and Kent, now draws 12,000 people a year at around pounds 200 per day shows how powerful the magic of hot nights under canvas really is. The firm's task is to recreate the district commissioner experience for all.

'We have to live up to the Out of Africa picture that everyone has,' said Primrose Stobbs, director of marketing. This means proper white linen sheets (hot water bottles are dropped in on cool evenings), directors' chairs and mock paraffin lamps in the tents, and servants flitting about arranging four-course dinners to be eaten off silver and cut glass. Though modern travellers tend to forgo the heavy dinner jacket.

The tents are mosquito-proofed so travellers are denied the delights of fighting with swags of mosquito netting. (Interestingly, the mosquito netting is often translated into the four-poster-with-muslin-wrappings formula in the new-style colonialism.) As one veteran of the modern safari recalls, the tents virtually eliminate all dangers. 'No bugs, no lions, no snakes can get in, but special attention has to be paid to the doors because the baboons have been learning how to unzip them, which can be rather disconcerting.'

The whole provides that mix of rawness, discovery and boy-scout adventure with a dash of luxury that went with an intensity of lifestyle that we can get these days only by buying it like this, in neatly-arranged travel packages. 'When you are part of a little party, sitting round the fire in the evening with your drinks, in the middle of the bush in the middle of Africa, you have the most extraordinary sensation,' said Primrose, who herself once farmed up-country in Kenya.

The interior designer Simon Playle, whose introduction card carries a colonial bedroom scene he designed for the British Interior

Design Exhibition in London in the Eighties, had to resort to the BBC sound archives to recreate the sound effects that contribute to that intensity.

A tape of cicadas played in the room. 'It was slightly French colonial with shuttered windows and an amazing programme of lighting which started at dawn and went through to dusk when the stars came out.'

The room, featuring an iron campaign bed swathed in muslin, trembled with atmosphere. For props, Playle opted for sepia prints of a maharaja, a porcelain lamp in the shape of a monkey, and another monkey (stuffed) escaping from a cage in the background.

Victorian houses, in his view, lend themselves particularly well to the colonial style because the windows take well to having shutters attached - though they must be painted in tired, sunbleached colours, rinsed-out greens and dusty blues. And muslin, which has for years laboured in the kitchen and the nursery, providing us with pudding cloths and nappies, has found itself elevated to the upstairs world of living rooms and bedrooms.

Muslin's romantic, creamy-white wispiness has become an essential ingredient in the effective recreation of that sepia photograph look in the home. There are practical points to be remembered about it, though. First, it shows the dirt and needs frequent washing. Second, it shrinks by up to eight per cent, so your windows could end up looking mini-skirted if you don't allow for this.

For Habitat, the colonial style marked a completely fresh look for the Nineties. The style took it cleanly away from the polished pine coffee tables and soapdish sofas that it had been associated with since the days of Conran. It was launched with the Tribal Collection in 1991, followed in 1992 by the Tropical Collection. The rattan chair, particularly the upright Corfu chair, became an instant hit, selling more than any other piece of furniture in the 29-year history of the firm.

Original colonial furniture is hard to find. Several dealers have stopped importing during the recession, and are waiting for home owners to start spending again. But colonial furniture compares favourably in price with antique furniture of a similar period, still being enjoyed for its curiosity rather than investment value.

William Hiley is managing director of William Sheppee Indian Antiques, which is to designers of the colonial style what a watering hole is to thirsty elephants. 'Colonial style is not to everybody's taste,' he said. 'It's quite rare because there wasn't ever a lot of it around and much of it hasn't survived insect attack.' Another of Emily Eden's letters, quoted by Tricia Foley, describes the reality of the threat: 'The degree of destructiveness of this climate it is impossible to calculate, but there is something ingenious in the manner in which the climate and the insects divide the work. One cracks the bindings of the books, the other eats up the inside; the camp turns the satin gown itself yellow, and the cockroaches eat up the net that trims it; the heat splits the ivory of a miniature, and the white maggots eat the paint; and so they go on helping each other and never missing anything.'

Satinwood and ebony collapsible cupboards are very hard to get hold of. Mr Hiley points out that if you want to move them about you need an awful lot of servants to help you collapse and transport them. Camphor chests, on the other hand, naturally insect-proof, ideal for the bottom of the bed, sell for around pounds 650. Regency Indian Sheraton benches (like four chairs stuck together) sell for around pounds 1,500.

They all used to be on display in the William Sheppee shop, which is no longer open. Now the furniture is piled high in a warehouse and can only be seen by appointment. 'In the shop we would get all these wonderful old boys who had been in the Bengal Lancers coming in to look, admire and reminisce. But not to buy. It is the very rich who go for these pieces.'

The William Sheppee antique rosewood planter's chairs, dated around 1870 to 1880, sell for about pounds 475. 'They are called that because the only position you can sit in them is with your legs hitched up over the arms. You can do nothing, apart from read the newspaper and have a drink. Tea planters were considered so idle and wealthy that they were eminently suited to the furniture,' said Mr Hiley. The chairs were also known to be convenient for amorous encounters, though Mr Hiley, with a rectitude our colonial forebears would have been proud of, did not point this out.-