Art Deco for the home/home office

May 6, 2009 5:47 AM

My Bioshock obsession has turned into an Art Deco obsession. What are some inexpensive ways to turn portions of my home - specifically, home office and bedroom - into Rapture rooms? Looking for ideas for which items to collect, as well as any specific online merchants to acquire them from. Bonus points for photos of great interior spaces made over into Art Deco wonderlands.
posted by jbickers to Home & Garden (4 answers total)

The problem with designing in art deco is that it was a style created for, and used by, the upper-upper classes as an expression of their extreme taste and luxury. It's a bit of a "complete" style in that it doesn't play nice with other styles. A Louis the 16th gilt table looks lovely in a room full of other Louis the 16th objects, all by itself, not so much. That and there are many flavors *of* deco to choose from. The "true" flowering, swirling deco. The stark, geometric Moderne, the pastel-pink of South Beach...all have different looks.

Additionally, a flood of cheap deco-y objects hit the market in the 30s and one of the primary aspects of Art Deco is really high quality materials, so finding good, cheap examples are rare indeed. So much of it looks so cheesy. The brief 70s-80s reinterpret of deco didn't help with it's insane glass blocks and over-sized everything. Argh.

Your best bet might be to adopt a mixed early 20th century style. A more domestic, lived-in kinda deco rather than some sweeping tycoon's office. The 1940s with 1920s touches. Think about wainscoting in dark wood with a geometric green wallpaper. a roll-top desk (possibly impossible in the age of computers), an iconic green desk lamp and lots of ferns. Think wood. Think stark contrasts in color, and think low to the ground (everyone forgets how *small* original art deco furniture was). Find some movies from the 1930s and look how the "normal characters" have thier homes set up, not just Nick and Nora.


The House Of the Black Madonna is a good example of a style of deco that didn't get too overexposed. I love the idea of thin, black striped white wallpaper next to some a real dark wood cabinet that has some pale-red Korean vase in it. Exoticism was also in vouge during the period, so a rough-hewed but geometrically interesting African next to some elegant day-bed (Look into day beds, they came up a lot in the late 20s) would be very deco indeed.
posted by The Whelk at 7:23 AM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]

Actually, Moderne drew a lot from Japanese design. You might want to find one really, really nice object and keep the rest the room relatively empty so you use the starkness to your advantage as you slowly find more things.
posted by The Whelk at 7:26 AM on May 6, 2009

I'm showing my bias here in what I like in the style (there was a whole big fad for animal skins that just leaves me cool) but here are some things that say Deco to me and are kinda-aorta within reach.

The Hotel Rex in San Fransisco one of the best "Homey Deco On a Budget" looks I've ever seen. It's almost all archived by color. The trim and bookcases are dark dark brown, almost black. The Walls are a burnt yellow-orange and the ceiling is jade. No pure, saturated colors are used and black is often an accent color. Geometric patterns dominate. Have a look here:


http://blog.gay.com/.a/6a00e55392afe18833011279469f7c28a4-400wi

Almost all of that is color, with some chronoclasm touches like a rotary phone and globe. (If you do get a rotary phone for your office, make sure it's a real Bakerlite one.)

A room

The couch is too puffy for my tastes, but whatevers.

http://www.jdvhotels.com/files/Image/554/callout.jpg

Note the shape and size of the chairs. Note the old-fashioned way of arranging painings. This is a bad flash, in reality the chairs are a pale green and the walls much more yellow-orange.

If you check around the Rex's website you can find some larger pictures.
posted by The Whelk at 7:40 AM on May 6, 2009

Nothing says Deco like Tamara de Lempicka. If you got a print and framed in a simple Deco style frame that would be a great first step.
posted by tula at 8:35 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]