Home Sweet Nature Preserve: Interiors Hear the Call of the Wild

Wild-animal motifs are being herded into the home.

While fashionable women and children are wearing faux fur coats and buying leather goods stenciled to look like crocodile and alligator, the home is fast becoming a preserve for fuzzy rugs and printed carpet, stenciled leather upholstery, textiles for bed and bath and accessories as diverse as decorative pillows, drawer pulls and life-size sculptures.

There is no harm to nature since most of the hides are fake, the animals mere effigies. The only peril to the home is in taking the look beyond a level of good taste.

Current interest focuses on African, Asian and West Indian patterns that figure heavily in modern design. Wall Street could be a contributing factor, because there’s a belief in the home furnishings industry that the desire for things modern waxes and wanes with the economy.

The use of wild-cat motifs also is in keeping with an escalating interest in Art Deco. Remember the black porcelain panther ready to pounce from mantel or table top?

Animal-hide floor covering traditionally was for the affluent--some trophies of the hunt--but no more. Animals are protected, and prices for all that’s faux are consistent with carpets and rugs of similar quality.

“Every designer seems to be using it in some project somewhere,” Kyle Corey says. The vice president of Rosecore Carpet Co. Inc. says that while patterned broadloom has been around for decades, animal prints in machine-made needle points and hand-tufted area rugs are new.

Rosecore, a to-the-trade showroom in New York, is marketing leopard, ocelot, tiger, zebra and antelope skin patterns in broadloom and area rugs. It also has cowhide rugs stenciled to resemble the wild hides that are protected.

As part of the trend toward English colonial furniture design, wild animals are showing up on African-made brass knobs and handles for furniture, cabinetry and doors.

Nature calls in today’s bathrooms, too, with a wide range of accessories.

At Simon’s Hardware & Bath in New York, wild monkeys appear in decoupage on bathroom wastebaskets and tissue boxes. Water faucet kits come with elephants, panthers, cobras and other animals in relief on the handles. A bathroom sink glazed and fired in a leopard skin motif is available by order. An 18-by-30-inch panel of painted ceramic tiles depicts a tiger in the jungle.

“The wild-animal designs are wilder and more cosmopolitan than the country look with its barnyard animals, and they appeal to clients with sophisticated tastes,” says Simon’s co-owner, Chris Nicole Prince.

For the masses, from Dan River there’s cotton and polyester bedding in the “Snow Leopard” pattern. The line has been in the stores for about five months.

“It is as strong in the heartland as in New York City,” says John Hall, sales and marketing vice president.

Dan River makes window treatments and decorative pillows in the pattern, but consumers are most likely to find it as a prepackaged ensemble of sheets, pillowcases, pillow shams and comforter for about $100 in any size.

Dan River also makes bedding in wild-animal prints for department store private labels.

Macy’s West stores, 82 in all, opened Call of the Wild shops last October, stocked with sheets, throw pillows, accent rugs, towels, bath accessories, tableware, gifts and ceramics. Related items can be found throughout the stores.

“There is not a floor without an animal print in some product or another,” says Julian Tomchin, senior vice president. “Customers have told us, ‘We like more animal skins,’ both in ready-to-wear and sheets.”

Catalogs are a good source for animal motifs too.

“We have salad tongs with giraffe handles and carved wood and stone rhinoceroses, elephants, hippos, zebras, lions and antelopes,” says Richard Rosen, a developer of the By Nature catalog ([800] 938-8811).

The catalog, based in Miami Beach, Fla., debuted in the summer. The growing visibility of stuffed animals, animal hides and horns was one reason Rosen and his associates started the catalog.

“Items from the natural world really warm up a room,” Rosen says. “And custom furniture makers and designers have been using them more often. That is what gave us the clue that there might be wider interest.”