Mexican style furniture is one of our favorites - we love both the sometimes simple and sometimes intricate furniture pieces which originate there.  And we are in love with their use of color.

Colonial Arts.com is a great site to look at old and antique Mexican style furniture.  You can see there that you should be able to find some simple or rustic pieces of  pine furniture at thrift stores or craigslist that look very similar and then paint or stain them to use with your own style of southwest decor.

Cactus Creek Daily.com has some great examples of colored Mexican furniture.  Turquoise is often used in Mexican furniture and in southwest decorating.  We think a turquoise dining room table and chairs would be fabulous.  We plan to find 6 or 8 pine chairs (not all necessarily matching) and a pine dining table and put together our own set.  The stunning uniqueness of turquoise makes it one of our favorite colors - that and red of course.  Use these websites the same way we recommend using southwest decorating magazines - find what makes your socks roll up and down and try to duplicate it.  Oprah has entire shows on this technique for fashion - why not use it for decorating your home.

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Some do it yourself advice - Minwax has a water based stain available in 74 colors which we have used to stain old furniture pieces.  On one little cabinet we did the body of the cabinet in a green tone and each of the five drawers a different color.  It is a very inexpensive piece of pine furniture and it now looks like an antique from Mexico.  We did not add any texture to this piece but it is a great option and we have done some.

Equipale furniture is straight from Mexico and works well as accent pieces or for an entire area.  We used it along with an antique piece we stained with the Minwax stains to furnish this loft area.  A primitive sun metal wall art piece, three candlesticks and our obnoxious Corona light and viola, southwest decor in a small loft area. Click on picture for larger view.  Also view many more pieces of the Equipale furniture at Equipale.com.

The use of cactus on furniture is unique to Mexico because most cacti is protected in the United States.  La Fuente Imports carries an extensive line of Quisco Cactus inlaid furniture which is made in Chile.  This furniture is very exclusive to southwest decorating and we highly recommend it.  We have been so successful in purchasing bundles of saguaro cactus ribs for our custom decorating and texture and we are now checking for a supplier of quisco cactus for this same purpose.  Once we find it we will complete projects with it and put instructions and pictures of our results on this site.

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