Art Deco Interiors: Decoration and Design Classics of the 1920s and 1930s

By the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1925, the idea that an interior and its furnishings 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 in Europe and America. Using contemporary photographs and illustrations of interiors, juxtaposed with modern photographs of individual pieces, it traces the stylistic evolution and dominant motifs of Deco. Patricia Bayer illustrates the triumph of the 1925 exhibition and the establishment of the pure high style of the leading Paris ensembliers, and assesses the tremendous growth of jazzy, Streamline Moderne offshoots in the United States. Major chapters are devoted to large-scale designs for ocean liners, cinemas, theaters, offices, and hotels, and to the revival in the 1970s and 1980s of Deco as a decorative style.