Art Deco in interiors: geometry, material and light instead of showy extravagance

How do you recognise Art Deco?

If you look not at historical details but at how a contemporary interior is put together, Art Deco is usually recognisable by three layers, and none of them comes down to objects:

1. Geometry. Fan shapes, chevrons, stepped forms, circles and ovals, strict symmetry in the key compositional elements.
2. Material as decor. Marble and onyx, fine-wood veneer, brass and bronze, mirror, including églomisé: gilding or silvering applied to the back of the glass, with an engraved pattern.
3. Light that reveals. Directional and accent light; under general lighting alone, stone and metal look noticeably flatter.

Colour is deliberately missing from this list: in our version of Art Deco it usually isn't the main carrier of the style but a backdrop, either deep and dark or evenly light, that supports the stone and metal rather than competing with them. Everything else follows from these three. That's why, in our projects, Art Deco layers easily onto a contemporary base: expressiveness is added locally, without rebuilding the logic of the space.

Historical Art Deco → contemporary interpretation

In brief, here is how the interiors of the 1920s and 1930s differ from the way the same devices work in a contemporary project:

What this looks like on real projects

A 180 m² apartment is contemporary Art Deco in a residential setting: an intimate entrance hall with a floor panel made from four types of stone and a handmade églomisé mirror, and a master bathroom built on backlit onyx surfaces. The bedroom, meanwhile, is deliberately kept free of anything superfluous: the style is gathered in two features and doesn't spread across the apartment.

A 250 m² apartment shows the same principle on a larger floor area: a natural onyx panel in the open-plan kitchen-living room is the single strong accent of the shared space, and the second expressive feature is placed in the master bathroom, clad in Calacatta marble with brass inlays.

The RCC Pilates studio, 800 m² is a competition concept for a public interior built on the same logic: a round bronze Oculus mirror, Crema Marfil natural stone mosaic and alabaster light fittings hold the geometry and materiality, while diffused and reflected light changes the mood of the hall through lighting scenes rather than changes of decor. The project was produced for a competition and was not built: the studio publishes it as an example of its approach to the format, not as a completed project.

How it comes together in a project

The accent feature. Art Deco needs a centre: a surround, a panel, the fireplace area, the wall behind the headboard. It gathers attention and takes the pressure off everything else.

A linking material. One material should run through several rooms: the same stone in the kitchen and the bathroom, the same shade of brass across all the hardware. This is what sets a well-composed interior apart from a collection of showy rooms. A practical caveat: if the same natural stone is meant to link several rooms, it's sensible to reserve the full quantity from a single batch. If stone for the bathroom is bought six months later, it comes from a different block in the quarry, and the tone and veining will differ just enough for the link to stop reading.

Light is planned in the documentation, not chosen at the end. Niche lighting, directional light on a panel, a light fitting as an object in its own right: all of this goes into the technical drawings, because changing such decisions later usually means opening up finished surfaces. What this section includes is covered in the article ‘What's included in an interior design project’.

Where excess begins

In Art Deco every device carries a charge of its own, so a mistake in dosage shows immediately. The signs of overdoing it are simple: an accent in every room; more than two assertive stones on different surfaces of one area (within a single piece there can be as many as four, because there the pattern is composed); two or three shades of metal with no hierarchy, so you can't tell which one leads and which supports; mirrored surfaces facing each other.

In our practice, one dosage rule works: one strong accent per apartment plus one or two supporting ones, and everything else as backdrop. A house has more features, such as the shared living area, the study and the spa area, but the principle holds: an accent needs a pause around it, otherwise it stops being an accent.

The easiest place to check the dosage is the visualisation: if the eye doesn't know what to catch on first, there are already too many accents. Removing them at this point is cheaper and more honest than telling yourself later that “it was meant to be like that”. One caveat: visualisation averages out stone, so the veining of a slab and the translucency of onyx have to be checked in person.

Art Deco in a small apartment

The dosage rule doesn't change with floor area, but in a compact apartment it applies more strictly. Where a larger space can take one strong accent plus one or two supporting ones, in an apartment without separate guest or utility areas it's often better to drop the supporting accents altogether and keep one feature for the whole plan.

In this case the linking material is best reduced to a single detail rather than carried through several rooms: the same stone or brass as in the accent feature reappears in the edge of a worktop or the frame of a mirror in the adjoining area, rather than making a statement of its own.

Choosing the accent feature becomes a weightier decision than in a house with several such points. It's the only one on the plan and has to sit where people actually look, such as a surround at the headboard, an églomisé mirror in the entrance hall or a panel behind the TV in an open-plan living room.

What this means for the budget

The budget gap in Art Deco usually comes from two groups of items: natural stone and custom-made pieces. An onyx panel can't be picked as a single catalogue line: specific slabs have to be selected, the pattern composed and the cutting planned. Surrounds, hand-finished mirrors, built-in furniture with complex fronts: each piece has its own drawing.

The consequence is that the volume of drawings grows with the number of custom pieces and the complexity of the lighting. The style itself has nothing to do with it; Art Deco simply tends to have more of these items. With many such elements, the project needs a scope of documentation that the Basic package doesn't include: separate drawings for custom pieces, junction details and lighting. A breakdown of what affects the price and why is in the article ‘What makes up the price of an interior design project’.

Where to start

If Art Deco appeals to you, the place to start isn't choosing the stone but identifying the accent features: the points in your apartment where people actually look. This is decided together with the layout, at a consultation or at the first stage of the design project, where the style is fixed at the same time as the furniture arrangement, not after it.