Two trends have dominated the mainstream home furnishings marketplace for the past decade: an urban loft style of skinny sofas and plastic chairs, and a masculine look of big brown leather sofas and chunky dark tables and chests.

A new company called Brocade Home is launching with the mailing of ''several million'' 64-page catalogs. Lush photos brim with enough crystal chandeliers, satin coverlets, pink crushed-velvet pillows and sexy boudoir tables to channel Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw.

Spun off from parent Restoration Hardware, Brocade Home is targeting a younger audience -- women in their 30s. The aesthetic has ''feminine energy,'' as Lisa Versacio, the creator of this new venture, likes to say. Versacio, whose official title is senior vice president of new business development for Restoration Hardware, was the brains behind the successful West Elm launch for Williams-Sonoma in 2002. For that brand she created a less expensive aesthetic that ushered in a penchant for Asian nesting tables and quilted futons.

And she has company. At furniture retailers, department stores and online home furnishing sources, sofas with graceful contours and tufted backs, rococo mirrors and furnishings with frankly more feminine, often more European, styling are arriving on selling floors.

There have always been alternatives to macho and modern, such as Anthropologie, the Marrakech-meets-Milan chain founded in 1992. There are now 82 Anthropologie stores displaying ruffled blouses and flouncy tiered skirts next to silk comforters and flowered porcelain that La Boheme 's Mimi would adore. The fall catalog features large-scale toile sheets, velvet sofas and heavily fringed crewelwork pillows. The store's customers are about 80 percent women.

Sensing a similar mood, Brocade Home is hoping to jump-start ''the feminine home for the 21st century,'' says Versacio. When she left West Elm two years ago, she saw something missing from the home retail landscape. She conceived a line of merchandise with elements of modern, elements of vintage and something she calls a ''softness meets strength'' mood.

Restoration Hardware chief executive Gary Friedman, who was thinking of expanding the company's portfolio, signed her up to create a new brand. The business plan calls for www.brocadehome.com to launch online shopping early next year (you can order a free catalog from the website now). Retail stores could begin opening by 2007. No word on where they will be.

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