Interior Design, Best of Residential 2013 ­— Elegant Deco Villa

If you normally equate traditional with stuffy, throw open the windows and take a breath of fresh air.

The 1920s and ’30s were a period of metamorphosis for Kuwait: Borders were set, a Municipal Council was formed, and oil was discovered. What better time to look to—especially given the contemporaneous Art Deco movement—when furnishing a villa in the country’s exclusive Gulfside beach community of Messila?

Yvonne Colacion appointed the residence—whose architecture was conceived by the late Alberto Pinto and Dar Al-Omran—with luxurious furnishings and textiles, high-contrast graphic area rugs, and custom touches like a 360-degree wall frieze. Deco-style antiques and reproductions are formally arranged throughout, most strikingly in the majlis (Arabic for living room), in which pairs of lounges inspired by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann sit opposite a Philip and Kelvin Laverne coffee table etched with a Chinese landscape. A chaise with bolster fabric embroidered by Maison Lesage reclines between the windows, which overlook an elegant patio warmed by a fireplace.

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