Oriental Home Decor - Refers to item furnished with dark wooden pieces against light walls, thus made them stand out but elegant. Describing oriental styles or Asian art like simplicity, balance, peaceful, practical and harmony. A colorful accessories can be used to compliment the designs, using itme like rugs, silverware, jadestone, ivory, Celadon, coral and calcedony, elephants and dragons, Thaisilk, Japanese kimono, wall fans, teakwood and wooden lacquerware, tea sets, placemat, scarves, screens and silk pillow cushion. That is why these pieces of furniture and home decorating items are a welcome and embraced by most people's homes. Tabletop lamps are an easy way to bring an Asian design furniture accent into your home.

Oriental furnitures and home decoration styles are rich in history and evolution from decades to decades, thus become one of the best ketp secrets in south East Asian. The history throughout the centuries has evolved people and their culture. Furniture and home decor items are functional no matter which way you look at. Style also changes as the furniture's function evolves.

In the last forty years or so there have been great changes in our understanding of the art of Southeast Asia. Perspectives have altered in the light of fresh research and there has been an increasing appreciation of work that falls outside the confines of the old Hindu classical evaluation of Southeast Asian art. The work of writers from within the region has alos broadened the scope of critical debate. New insights into the artistic worlds of early inhabitants of the region have been made possible through recent archaeological excavations and technical developments in the analysis of finds. The range and extent of the bold patterns on the prehistoric pottery found at Ban Chiang in Thailand, for example, was unimaginable until the site was excavated in the 1970s. The Neolithic site of Peinan in Taiwan, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, was not fully investigated until 1980. With the restoration of peace and the opening up of countries like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam in the late twentiteth century, western scholars have also been able to share new research relating to ancient monuments and works held in museum within the region. The rapprochement with China has also led to opportunities to study more closely the relationship between the art of that great country and that of Southeast Asia. Polotical and social changes in the region have aso given rise to a new generation of artists who have brought fresh vigour and energy into the field, both drawing on and challenging existing traditions. At the same time, the the thrust of western analysis of art has changed, with a stronger emphasis on the role of context and culture - political and social - inframing the articulation of ideas.

The term 'Southeast Asia' is now generally used to refer to the countries belonging to the organization ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Whether it is appropriate to consider this group as a whole in terms of its art and culture is another question. Geography and language divide the region into two main parts: the maritime region, which includes the insular and peninsular parts of Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the Indonesian archipelago and the Philipines, and the mainland, which includes Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Polotical boundaries do not correspond precisely with cultural patterns however, which derive in part from ancient patterns of migration. In the prehistoric period, speakers of Austronesian languages from Southwest China moved southwards through the islands, bringing with them cosmological beliefs, language, kinship systems, material culture and artistic forms that left a lasting legacy. Later, speakers of the Tai group of languages, again from the north, travelled and settled along the valleys of the mainland. Cultural links extend to some of the people of the Assam hillsin India to the northwest, to indigenous people of the Andaman islands and to some of the peoples of the islands of Oceania. Neither should Taiwan's part in the spread of Austronesian culture during the Prehistoric period be overlooked. The influence of world religions has forged links between some cultures within the region and defines differences between others. Hinduism and Buddhism, two faiths so closely connected that they are in many ways inseparable, were brought to both mainland and insular Southeast Asia at around the same time, coexisting in may early kingdoms for a period. But the degree to which they took root varied considerably. In the mainland, Buddhism became established in many centres, gathering adherents until it became the dominant religion from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east. The majority of the people of thee islands, on the other hand, subsequently adopted either Islam or, in lesser numbers, Christianity. Indigenous beliefs retain their strong hold in many societies, often inextricably intertwined with elements of the newer religions. The island of Bali has developed its own distinctive form of Hinduism.

While broad similarities of language and religion define the respective cultures of the mainland and the islands, there is considerable diversity in underlying patterns of culture, which affect artistic expression both materially and in symbolic ways. There are hundreds of ethnic groups, identifiable by their different languages, costumes, beliefs or practices. Patterns if kinship, economic activity, social governance, custom and ritual vary widely across the region, and these differences are often expressed artistically in material form as well as in performance. Nonetheless, there are enough features common to peoples and cultures across the region to justify considering it as a whole. Both the islands and the mainland lie squa, rely on two major trade routes, maritime and overland, between East and West. Since at least the start of the first millenium AD, ships carrying cargoes between China and India have stopped at ports along the coast of Southeast Asia to barter and exchange, providing a rich source of revenue to local rulers. An abundance of natural products - timber, resins and animal products from the forests of the hinterland, precious stones and metal ores from the mountains and river beds, and spices from the eastern islands - have also supplied overseas demand and brought wealth to the region. Rich rulers close to the mouths of the rivers (early ports) controlled the overseas trade, exchanging luxury imports for the products supplied from upstream. This pattern of interaction with foreigners and the resulting relationships between downstream rulers and upstream inhabitantsora of shared artistic was repeated throughout Southeast Asia, resulting in a plethora of shared artistic forms influenced by the trade in overseas goods.

Differences of geography have created contrasting patterns of agriculture and thus social systems across the region. In the mountainous uplands the land lent itself to swidden cultivation, in which fields were cut from the forest, planted for a few seasons and then left fallow to recover. The land needed to provide for each family stretched a considerable distance, so the size of community that could govern itself as a stable unit was relatively small. These upland regions thus evolved patterns of chieftaincies, usually dominated by lineage heads. In contrast, the lowland plains and valleys were fed by rivers carrying rich and fertile waters, allowing for wet rice cultivation, which yielded much heavier crops. Denser populations grew up, and with them the opportunity for leaders to accumulate surplus rice and so power: or other activities, their products exchanged for food grown by others. Armies could be fed and workers enlisted to build irigation systems, towns and later, cities. It was from these lowland settlements that highly stratified societies began to develop, and these eventually grew into city states with courts. Much of the early artistic production that has survived from Indonesia as well as Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma and Thailand originated from these courts.

Oriental style furniture covers a wide varieties of different styles from furniture to placemat in several different countries. Some styles are very popular with Western consumers and in North America. For instance, everyone in the U.S. knows what a Shoji screen is. These screens are popular room dividers and using everywhere from bedrooms to living rooms. These screens are a kind of oriental unique style and design to fit in western styles easily. Asian lanterns are also a popular way of adding a decorative lighting accent to a room like living room and bedroom, thus created relaxing mood and tone. Asian lantern comes in many format like tabletop, hanging lantern and wall attached lantern. The newly design lantern combine aromatic therapy like buring oils and spread healing scent all over your room, isn't nice? Asian antiques are also an incredibly sought after style of Asian furniture and decorating items. Here we'll get you through some of oriental uniqe styles which will bring us closer to the nature and artifact-free decorating styles.

Oriental lamp - Finding just a lamp to fit in your living room is easy, but gettting the uniqe styles and nice design lamp to match your room takes you time some money. Of course, lamps fill light, decoration and unique style to any room. A dark corner of a room not used much can benefit from well chosen, nice design lamps. Consider oriental lamps not only do they provide light, design and brilliance, oriental lamp also look great with any home furnishing styles.

A mixture of Asian art and natural materials like bamboo, Saa paper (mulberry paper) and so created mood and tone in your house. Nowaday, people from western and european turn themselves to Asian healing and sort out for home decorating items to fullfill their houses.

Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean and Tibetan furniture are those that fall under the Oriental decorating style. Many of these styles seem similar, but they are unique and special. Each oriental style has its personality of their own. However, furniture from these different countries can work well together under one design theme. The Asian furniture mainly designed from peace of mind, long established cultures over hundreds years and spirit of Asian craftsmen. They're all seem to work well when doing mix and match.

If you do have a design theme that you are going for, keep that in mind when you are looking to purchase furniture for your home. Your theme might be tranquility and harmony. Another theme might be comfort and functionality. Whatever your theme may be, Asian home furniture can easily help you achieve your design goals.

From screens, windchimes, Buddha banner, oriental placemat to day beds and platform beds, you can easily decorate just one room or your entire house in a Asian design theme. A selective mix of pieces from different countries can create a well decorated home. The more you learn about the different styles, it will become apparent which items you prefer from which country. You may fall in love with Shoji screens at the same time you might equally adore a Korean tansu or Tung from Thailand. Believe me, they 're all can work well in your home. If you like a Asian home decor style, you can make it work in your home.

Celadon ware - Celadon is named after a character in Honoré d' Urfé's 1610 play, L'Astrée, a sheperd who wore a light green cloak with grey green ribbons. Nowadays the name is used to describe a particular type of stoneware(mainly green). The hue most popularly associated with the name is a pale willow green, but in fact it ranges from dark jade to white, with greys, yellows and greens in between. The precise color depends on the clay, the glaze, and the temperature and conditions in the kiln, which is high-fired to around 1,250 degrees centigrade in a reduction atmosphere. As one authority notes: "There has been a recent move to call celadons green-wares". This is to be deplored as many celadons are not green and many green wares are not celadons." It is also worth nothing that some modern chemical glazes that use copper or lead are not celadon

Celadon was -re-introduced into Thailand from Burma at the beginning of the 20th century, and has since then, in fits and starts, enjoyed considerable export sucess. The center of production is the northern city of Chiang Mai, to where Shans moved across the border on a number of occasions as part of re-settlement programmes. The Shan potters, who appear to have come from Mongkung in the Shan States, settled near the Chang Puak Gate in 1900, and began producing basic ceramic wares like pots and basins, with a rather dull grey-green celadon glaze.

Asian Silverware - Silverware in Thailand has long established reputation on its delicacy, durability and follows an ancient tradition. Thus, become one of the favorite travellers to bring home gifts and silverware home decorating. Beyond it's beauty and unique styles, there's so many stories on that. Vitive plaques from the 8th century have been found in Maha Sarakham Province in the north-east and silver miniature stupas from sounthern Thailand date to the 11th century. The technical influences reached the country from all directions at different periods, and while techniques of working precious metals were probably first introduced by Indian traders, the strongest stylistic influences have been from Burma and China. The Burmese influence was felt most strongly in Chiang Mai, particularly at the end of 18th century when the ruler, Chao Kawila, needed to re-settle the city after its long occupation by the Burmese: as he moved lacquer-working villages from the Shan States, he simultaneously brought in communities of Shan silversmiths. Since then, the Wua Lai Road area of the city, named after the original Shan villages from the Salween River, has maintained a silver-working tradition. This has been helped in recent years by the demands of the tourist industry, but has suffered a decline in quality for the same reasons.

In Bangkok, where the mainstream of precious-metal working took place, the formative influences was Chinese. It began at about the same time, in the Rattanakosin period. The whole issue of Chinese immigration into Thaialnd in the 19th century, almost all from Fukein and Kwangtung, is both fascinating and uncomfortable fro many Thais, for while the Chinese quickly came to dominate trades such as silversmithing, they also eventually assimilated themselves into Thai society more thoroughly than in any ther Southeast Asian nation. Both Carl Bock in 1887 and M.F. Laseur in 1885 noted that Chinese were dominant among gold- and silversmiths. In fact, silver was but one aspect of the situation; Friedrich Ratzel wrote in 1876, "while elsewhere they make their living mainly as merchants and only secondarily as miners and fishemen, in Siam they control the entire economic life".

While the Chinese brough new skills where silver was concerned, particularly in repoussée work, their tight guild organization excluded the Thais until the two groups began to intermarry. But over the years, their techniques spread outwards wile they absorbed Thai stylistic influences. Sylvia Fraser-Lu, in her book "Silverware of South-east Asia (1989)", assesses it thus: Their work has become virtually indistinguishable from that of indigenous Thai craftsmen. They are able to produce both Thai and Chinese-inspired objects with equal skill."

The rectangular box is just such an example of highly skilled Thai-Chinese repoussée work for a Thai market that had developed a taste for Western-style objects in the late 19th century. The central character is the monkey-god "Hanuman", a popular mythical character from the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Indian epic tale of the travails of Rama.

In repoussée work, sheet metal is punched and hammered fro mthe inside to produce a relief decoration. It is first coated in oil and then worked face down on a bed of resin. As constant hammering weakness the silver structurally, the piece being worked must periodically be annealed through reheating. This process forms a residue of black oxide, which must then be removed in a pickling solution of dilute acid. This procedure may have to be repeated several times, depending on the complexity and relief of the design. The background here has been accentuated by punching down from the front, in a procedure known as chasing.

Silk is the filament produced by the caterpillars of a type of moth that feeds on the mulberry bush. Silkworms are not, in fact, worms; they spin their cocoons using their salivary glands at the time when they change from larvae into pupae. The silk from Thailand's caterpillar, most of which are raised on the Korat Plateau in the country's notheast, varies in color from pale gold to very pale green. Each cocoon is woven from a single thread that is 500-1,500 Metres long.One filament is too thin to use alone so many threads are combined to make a thicker, more practical fibre.

The technique of producing fabric from silk is credited to the Chinese who closely guarded the secret of silk-weaving for centuries. China dominated production with its smooth, satiny cloth, and the importance of the trade in it gave rise to the overland route known as the Silk Road. Th export of cocoons, silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds was banned, but eventuallly and inevitably some cocoons were smuggled out of China, and the techniques as well.

Silk production then spread to other Asian countries, including Thailand. Evidence from the Ban Chiang excavations, however, suggests the possibility that there was independent production in ancient times. As a cottage industry in Thailand, it dates back some hundreds of years. In contrst to the refinement of ancient Chinese silk, the Thai cloth has a relatively coares texture with uneven, slightly knotty threads, even though the silk itself is usually soft.

Buddhist Banner - Called Tung in northern Thai, these long cloth banners are a special feature of Lanna ceremonies, from festivals to funerals. They are essentially woven as offerings, both to the Buddha and to ancestors, and the latter belief suggests that these ritualistic hangings may havehad origins that pre-date Buddhism.

The tung shown here are the most usual kind, woven from cotton. They vary in width from 10 to 40 cm(4-16 in), depending on the width of the loom, and can be of any length between one and five m (3-15 ft). When presented to a monastery, they are hung from the roof or a pillar of the assembly hall, but at festivals they may be suspended from long bamboo poles. At the ceremony known as ngan poy luang, to celebrate the construction of a monastic buildings, the banners will line the approach road for up to a few hundred metres (approximately half a mile).

While found throughout the North, tung are woven and used religiously with a special fervour by the ethnic group, the Tai Lüe. The Thais as a whole belong to the much larger Tai ethnic family, which includes groups in South Yunnan, Northern Vietnam, Laos, and the Shan States of Burma. Most northern Thais are Tai Yuan, distinct from the Siamese of Central Thailand, but the much smaller group, the Tai Lüe, originally from Sipsong Pan-Na in China, have managed to maintain a strong, separate cultural identity. Most of them settled in the Nan valley in the early 19th century. The Tai Lüe monasteries are distinctive architecturally, and always contain inside a profusion of these long banners. Both the Tai Lüe and the Tai Yuan elaborate their belief in honouring ancestors by considering the banner to be a ladder to heaven; for this reason most tung are divided into steps arranged vertically. Old palm leaf manuscripts recounting legends such as the Tamnan Muang Chiang Saen and the Anisong Tan Tang describe both the merit-making reward of presenting a tung to the Buddha and the way in which the ladder will help someone who has died and gone to hell to climb back out and up to heaven.

Typically, woven tung are white, with colored supplementary weft, black and red being common. The most widely used motif is the 'prasat', the monument, which apprears at the tail, or in sequence up the steps of the 'ladder', or as one long structure fitting the main section of a shorter banner. Animals, particularly elephants, usually accompany this as friezes. The patterns are generally applied by either the 'chok' or 'khit' weaving techniques. In the former, the supplementary weft is applied by hand to specific areas and is discontinuous.

Although most tung are cotton, there are a number of other varieties. One is a webbed tung, called tung yai, in which bamboo strips are included to give it a structure that recalls a spider's web: this is characteristic of Chiang Mai and its surroundings. In this, either large cotton yarns alternate with bamboo slats, or else cottons is bound around the slats. Paper, flowers, garlands and other items are added as decorations at intervals called 'bai hai'(representing steps in the ladder) and at the tail.

Yet another, quite different style is of carved wood, usually teak. Such 'tung kradang' are elaborately carved, and are either fixed to a post or placed on a pedestal. Some of the finest are displayed within the main assembly hall at Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, near the northern town of Lampang. The picture on far left shows tung hanging in a 'viharn' in Wat Thai Fa Thai, in Phayao. The picture opposite top depicts a banner hanging outside the entrance to Wat Pantao in Chiang Mai.

Spirit houses - Animism runs deep in Thai belief, although without conflicting with Buddhism. Traditional belief systems revolve around the heirarchy of spirits of phi.

There are in total nine territorial guardian spirits. These are: Protector of the House; Protector of the Gates and Stairways: Protector of the Bridal Chamber; Protector of the Animals; Protector of the Store-houses and Barns; Protector of the Fields and Paddies; Protector of the Orchards and Gardens; Protector of the Terrace; and Protector of the Temple and Religious Establishments.

Traditionally, temporary shrines were erected fro ceremonial occasions when the spirits had to be invoked: birth, marriage, death and housebuilding. This practice at house-building led to the maintenance of a permanent shrine, because there was always the risk that the guardian spirit of the land, phra phum, would not accept the continued presence of the householder and his family. The full title of the guardian spirit is phra phum jao thi, the final two words meaning 'master of the place'. A specialist is needed to supervise the sitting of the spirit house, to make sure that every aspect is appropriate. If, for instance, it were located in the shadow of the house, the spirit would not give his protection. Daily offerings of a little rice are placed at the spirit house, and a special annual offering of pig's head and chicken is given, usually on New Year's Day(this occurs in April in Thailand)

The spirit house generally takes the form of a miniature traditional Thai house, usually with a little porch of veranda on which the offerings are placed. The style is open to interpretation, as these examples show. Figurines, are often placed within the tiny house. One specific figure is Jawet, a divinity holdings a sword, or a book and whip. The book contains the register of the good and evil acts committed by humans living within the area.

In village communities, the guardian spirit of the land is honoured as the phra phum ban (spirit of the village) with a specific (quite substantial) shrine in the form of a small house raised on posts, and located in its own fenced enclosure. Every year, at a special ceremony, the community traditionally offers food and other gifts. This custom is still maintained to an extent, but in the past it was taken very seriously. A British engineer, Holt Hallett, recounts, in his book A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States, that were closed of and "forbidden to strangers on the occasion of the sacrifice to the village tutelary spirit at the new year.