I have craved the fine white Asian porcelain known as blanc de Chine for more years than I care to admit. The real stuff is rather dear, so I don’t own much of it. But using nothing more than white spray paint from Walmart, a great friend of mine has figured out how to create lookalikes that resemble the real thing—at least from a respectable distance.

A former fashion executive at Ann Taylor—she selected the buttons used on the fashion company’s clothes, which is harder than you might imagine—Susan Manno is my go-to girl for inventive decorating. In her modest 18th-century country house in a flyspeck village in upstate New York she pairs edgy art by the likes of Peter Hujar, Donald Baechler, and Donald Lipski with Shaker-spare antiques and is renowned for coming out of unpromising dollar stores with ravishing accessories that make her friends green with envy.

And what Manno can’t find, she makes. Correction: remakes. Recently she has been haunting Manhattan's Chinatown and picking up plastic Madonnas and garishly colored ceramic statues and vases, treating them with thin coats of Walmart-brand white spray paint until the rainbow shades disappear and only the elegant silhouettes remain. The results really do resemble costly blanc de Chine. Think about that the next time you spy a hideous writhing dragon figurine from China.

Mitchell Owens
Editor at Large, ELLE DECOR