Art Deco Interiors

By the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1925, the idea that an interior and its furnishing should form a complete design - a 'total look' - dominated the thinking of both designers and their sophisticated clients. In the later 1920s and 1930s, whole studios were established, notably in France and the United States, to serve the needs of a design- and style-conscious middle class intent on showing off its newly refined taste for things modern and exotic: the richly lacquered screen, the tubular steel chair, the vivid geometric carpet. Art Deco Interiors documents this flourishing of design ingenuity through contemporary photographs and illustrations of selected interiors juxtaposed with modern photographs of individual pieces. It traces the stylistic evolution and dominant motifs of 'Deco'; the triumph of the 1925 exhibition and the pure,'high style' of the leading Paris ensembliers; the tremendous growth of jazzy, Streamline Moderne offshoots in the United States; the international revival of Deco as a decorative style for a new generation of post-modern designers; and the restoration of many Art Deco interiors to their original glory.