In 1901, French designers formed the Société des Artistes Décorateurs (SAD) to promote high-quality decorative arts, including furniture and interiors. Its salons gave decorators a regular public platform and helped shift taste away from late Art Nouveau toward simpler, more geometric forms that would later be associated with Art Deco.
In 1912, French officials decided to sponsor a major international exhibition of decorative arts, originally planned for 1915. World War I disrupted the schedule, but the planning effort kept pressure on designers and manufacturers to define a distinctly “modern” style for interiors and consumer goods.
Starting in 1917, designer Eileen Gray redesigned the Rue de Lota apartment in Paris for Juliette Lévy. The project became an early landmark of Art Deco interiors, using custom furniture and bold materials to create a unified room-by-room experience rather than treating furnishings as separate objects.
In 1921, Gray opened the Jean Désert gallery in Paris to sell furniture, screens, carpets, and full interior installations. This helped bring avant-garde interior design into a retail setting, making modern decorative ideas more visible to clients and the press.
The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts opened in Paris on 1925-04-28 and ran through 1925-11-08. It showcased a modern, luxury-focused approach to interiors—geometric forms, rich surfaces, and coordinated room settings—and later gave the movement its best-known name (“Art Deco,” derived from arts décoratifs).
At the 1925 exposition, Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann’s “Pavillon du Collectionneur” (Collector’s Pavilion) presented the idea of the ensemblier: a designer coordinating an entire interior from architecture and wall treatments to furniture and decorative objects. This “total interior” approach became a signature of high-end Paris Art Deco and influenced elite commissions abroad.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret presented the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 exposition, and it was inaugurated on 1925-07-18. Its stripped-down “white box” interior and emphasis on standardized furnishings argued against decorative excess, clarifying a split between ornamental Art Deco room design and emerging functional modernism.
The Chrysler Building opened in New York on 1930-05-27, turning Art Deco from elite rooms into a mass public experience. Its lobby’s polished stone surfaces and ceiling mural, Transport and Human Endeavor (1930), linked luxury interiors with speed, technology, and corporate identity—core themes of New York’s Art Deco image.
Between 1928 and 1932, Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet created the Maison de Verre in Paris, a residence and doctor’s office built around a metal frame and glass-block walls. Inside, movable partitions and custom metalwork showed how “modern” materials could still support richly designed interiors—an important bridge between Art Deco craftsmanship and machine-age construction.
Radio City Music Hall opened on 1932-12-27 as part of Rockefeller Center, with interiors designed in the Art Deco style by Donald Deskey. The building used modern industrial materials (like aluminum, glass, and chrome) in a carefully coordinated interior scheme, showing how Art Deco could shape large entertainment spaces as well as homes and boutiques.
On 1935-05-29, the French ocean liner SS Normandie began her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York. Her Art Deco and Streamline Moderne interiors—designed under architects such as Pierre Patout and featuring work by major French artists and craftsmen—exported the Paris luxury interior tradition directly to New York audiences.
The 1937 Paris world’s fair opened on 1937-05-25 and ran to 1937-11-25, with major new buildings created for the event (including the Palais de Chaillot). Coming during political tension and economic strain, the exposition reflected a more monumental, streamlined late Art Deco mood and helped mark the style’s last major showcase in Europe before World War II.
The 1939 New York World’s Fair opened on 1939-04-30 and promoted a future-focused design language. Its Theme Center—the Trylon and Perisphere—used clean, simplified forms and an interior exhibit by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, signaling a shift away from classic Art Deco ornament toward streamlined modern exhibition design.
By 1939, Art Deco interiors in Paris and New York had moved from luxury apartments and salons to corporate lobbies, theaters, ocean liners, and world’s fairs. The approach left a lasting legacy in how designers coordinate materials, lighting, graphics, and furniture as a single “total environment,” even as wartime conditions and postwar modernism pushed tastes in new directions.
Art Deco Interiors in Paris and New York (1910–1939)