Home interiors trend: A sophisticated return to art deco
Comfortable maximalism using brand new furnishings can deliver cosy Edwardian with art deco detailing layered on in accessorising, John Lewis AW collection.
It's little wonder that art deco is trending for 2022 in interiors. So lithe and lovely, it always had one high beaded shoe in each camp — period and contemporary and has been in a quiet renaissance since the 1960s.
Everyone seems to respond to its polite glamour, and yet often don’t recognise its enduring influence and the sly slide of the trombones of the 1920s all over the high street style hangars.
Art deco allows for busy, cosy Bloomsbury decorating with Arts & Crafts softening as easily as it bold Viennese modernism. You can find its sophistication in the cartoon level excess of Hollywood Regency in the States, and yet there it is in a soupy gold Edwardiana with the inclusion of cumulus backed, sculptural furniture and French marble clock garnitures.
When art deco slipped into the interior design in the British Isles after the legendary “Expedition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderns” in Paris in 1925, it gradually became an all-around favourite through the Western World. It’s still influencing interiors, jewellery design and fashion year on year. There was no going back. A middle-class family were unlikely to pitch out all their lumpy late Victorian fixtures and furniture in the pinched years after the end of WWII. The Deco elements appearing at pioneering moderately priced retailers, were accrued and layered in, finally replacing much of the turn of the century weight in the house. White, bone, monochrome and animal print – replaced the busy colour patterns of the turn of the century, and lavish gemstone colours were invited in.
The rich, on the other hand, could tailor searing European modernity from the ground up — erecting Brutalist buildings and finishing them surface to surface in sleek new age materials and lines. Whatever your background, art deco had a hint of wealth, sophistication and artiness about it. It was always elegant and at times highly radical. The streamlined forms, together with new geometric, post-modern cubist and later abstract textiles, ceramics, wallpapers and prints, gave confidence to a young audience of buyers mired in 19th-century expectations of what a civilised room should look like. Faded oriental rugs or bold arty abstracts can lend a 1930s edge. The shimmering nautical collection by Louis de Poortere for Harvey Norman is ideal and just the sort of thing that would have featured in rich Parisian apartments laid out against zebra skins over parquet. Prices from €435. Smoky sexy dark velvets with gilded accents, just purr on soft furnishings.
No one should curate the Deco look to a tee (unless you’re doing Noel Coward theatrics with the local am’ dram’). We’re making a polite high society bow. This can be done with both the lines of the things you buy in, plus the materials.
In the 1920s, man-made materials like Bakelite, smoked glass, applied chrome and polished concrete and terrazzo became familiar in public buildings of the time. These were used alongside more precious detailing — rich exotic veneers, silver, velvet, ivory, crystal and fur. Fan and sunburst motifs were highly desirable, and you can find these in period stained glass and cocktail cabinets. look at out for the classic glazed sunset cabinets that rose in every front room across the nation in the 1940s – regular old flappers at auction from €150 up. Statement mirrors? In my opinion, best bought new without any foxing or distress.
With the increasing exchange of information and popularisation of museum exhibitions, the exotic was always an influence on art deco. Famous archaeological digs thrilling the public with treasures from the tombs. Fashion was not confined to the catwalk and magazine illustrations and took flight in the bold dynamic new dances to nightclub swing like the Charleston. The worship of the female body (somewhat androgynous with women wrapping their breasts down to create a more boyish figure) was expressed with racy nude statuary from European sculptors including Demetre Chiparus. If you want to know the cadence of Art Deco decorating today. Look up the original pieces. Their symmetry laced with the purity and glamour of Louis XIV. There’s a hint of wit and excitement that marks it out from other rather safe “antique” styles that came before it. Baz Luhrmann’s fabulous take on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Gatsby” (2013) created new interest in the style that roared, and it’s still a splendid look-book of all things Deco and decadent.
With a fan-style velvet headboard you're a first-class passenger berthed starboard-home on the Queen Mary. Little bit of weird trivia here: “Port out/starboard home” is what makes up the letters of the world “posh” describing where the most affluent colonist had their cabins going to and from England. Art deco has a lot of posh about it. Bathrooms lend themselves to deco because once it seized the styling of bathroom ware, it never let go. Where Victorian taps can look 1980s stodgy and pretend, jazzy models from the 1920s to 1940s look bandbox perfect in a 2022 Italian inspired bathroom. Period art deco glass comes in prices from the banal boot sale division to the stratospheric studio art, perfect for gilding the interior of a cabinet or lighting up a slender console as their colour and line are completely undimmed by age. Be wary of kitsch art deco pieces typified in the 1980s like cheap resin sculptures of trumpet players and borzoi dogs as they can really play a flat note with that jazzy authentic feel.
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