What the Well-Dressed Tree is wearing this year
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Your support makes all the difference.Claudio Silvestrin, a famously severe architect, says his tree "will be naked. It certainly won't have any lovely things on it." But he's not all hard - underneath it, he hopes, will be his newborn baby.
Min Hogg, editor of The World of Interiors, will be abroad so she will probably hang balls (one colour only) from a metal chandelier. "But if I had a tree," she says fiercely, "it would be the same as last year and the year before and the year before. Definitely with no theme or design and certainly no ribbons. You should start collecting decorations when you are young and add one or two each year so that it is all glittery and there is hardly any green showing. And preferably a star, not a fairy, on top."
Franois Gilles, an interior designer, declares: "This year is ultra- natural - not even any green on the tree. You take a bare branch - maybe some driftwood or a dead rose tree - and hang it Nordic-style with wooden things on string. Maybe a bit of gold and silver glitter. And then top it with a gold or silver star. Or you could wrap a Christmas tree in sheer fabric with clear lights shining through; then cut a few holes and have one or two branches sticking out. This is magical."
Bridget Bodoano, the press officer at The Conran Shop, hates fashionable trees and likes "things you've collected over the years, specially when they've been made by your children"; but quickly remembering her job suggests that the shop's red chilli peppers hung on gold wire are, at £2.50, "quite sensational. And have you seen the mini-loofahs?" Yes, mock you may - "it would be terrible if you started taking things too seriously."
Claire Lloyd, an art director and stylist, usually goes back to Australia, where her parents always had a plastic tree until she told them she wouldn't go home if they didn't get a proper one. "But when I did have my own it was a little pine tree that you could replant, not a proper amputated Christmas tree that you feel you're being mean to. I hung it with purple matt and transparent balls tied in old-fashioned purple and gold ribbon and wrapped the base in mauve fabric. What I would never have is that horrible red and gold feathery stuff - yeah, tinsel, that's it."
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