Vintage View: Art Deco wall masks

Imagine yourself in the mid 1920s in a smart new, middle-class British suburb. Unless you are some well-heeled visionary aesthete collecting progressive design, your interior décor has a heavy fog of the dull and expected.

A typical, well behaved dining set comprising a sideboard, dining table with matching caned chairs in faux Elizabethan style — all dark oak, barley twists and knobbley knees, sitting ready for natters over a bare lamb chop.

The good room where you show off your increasing household income, now that you and the husband are working, stages over-stuffed corpses of hefty late Victorian and Edwardian parlour furniture. What light battles through the shrouding nets is suffocated in heavy velvet pelmets and floor length curtains, finally sucked down into a dark Oriental rug.