Inside the Glamour of 1920s Interior Design Style

Ask someone to picture a 1920s room and you’ll probably get black lacquer and a lot of chrome. That’s Art Deco, and it’s only part of the decade.

Between roughly 1919 and 1929, Victorian ornament gave way to geometric forms in lacquer, chrome, exotic veneers and glass. Craftsman bungalows were going up across the United States at the same time, along with period revival houses in the suburbs. In Germany, the Bauhaus circle was building the first stripped-down modernist rooms.

The name Art Deco came later than the decade itself. Art historian Norbert Wolf says the period’s own names were Style Moderne and Style 25 (Prestel, 2016), and the label arrived with a 1966 Paris exhibition.

What is 1920s interior design style?

Rooms stopped looking Victorian, roughly from 1919 to 1929. Edwardian and Victorian ornament was replaced by geometric, machine-age forms in luxury and industrial materials, and the point was for a room to look modern and expensive.

No single look won. Parisian salons, American bungalows and Bauhaus experiments all date to the same years, and they barely resembled each other.

Art Deco rooms, from Paris salons to New York apartments, are squarely in scope. So are Craftsman and period revival interiors fitted out during the decade, along with early modernist rooms in chrome-plated steel and plain surfaces. Anything finished after 1929 is out, even when it looks the part, and later reproductions and revivals don’t count either.

Bevis Hillier’s 1968 book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s argued the style shaped buildings, furniture, cinemas, trains and ocean liners.

Of all these looks, Art Deco interior design is the one most people picture, and it covers only part of what 1920s rooms actually were.

How the 1925 Paris Exposition shaped 1920s interiors

The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened in Paris on April 28, 1925. It gave the decade’s luxury style a showcase and, decades later, a name.

France wanted the fair to win back its standing as the capital of the decorative arts after the war, according to the Art Deco Society UK.

A few events had already set the terms. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 (German History in Documents and Images). In November 1922 Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, and lotus, scarab, pylon and pyramid imagery followed (V&A). Then in 1925 Le Corbusier built the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau alongside the fair, a direct argument against applied ornament, per the Museo Reina Sofia.

Art Nouveau interiors had set the pre-war mood. The 1925 generation worked from other sources, which the V&A lists as avant-garde painting, the Ballets Russes, folk art, ancient and exotic cultures and the imagery of machines.

The fair had 15,000 exhibitors (Art Deco Society UK, Dezeen). The Society counts 20 participating countries and 16 million visitors, while the Villa Noailles and the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Art Library say 21 countries, and the Villa Noailles puts attendance at over 15 million.

The counts differ by one country and roughly a million visitors, so quote ranges rather than one total.

The label came late. According to art historian Norbert Wolf, the style went by Style Moderne and Style 25 at the time, and the words “Art Deco” first appeared in print in 1966, in the title of the Paris exhibition Les Années 25.

Bevis Hillier’s 1968 book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s made the name stick, a University of Bologna research record notes.

Dates matter when judging examples. Guides often cite Eltham Palace as a 1920s interior, but Dezeen’s 2025 Art Deco Centenary profile dates the Courtaulds’ house to 1933 through 1936.

Gorgeous, yes. A 1930s room, though.

Art Deco was one of several competing looks in 1920s homes

Most American homes of the 1920s were not Art Deco. Craftsman bungalows and period revival houses carried the decade in most neighborhoods, while Art Deco belonged to fashionable city rooms and public buildings.

The Building Technology Heritage Library holds more than 1,700 catalogs from the 1920s, more than any other decade, and Architect magazine reads them as a preference for period styles from Colonial Revival to Spanish Revival.

Craftsman is the American branch of the Arts and Crafts movement. It spread through Gustav Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman and through kit houses from Sears and Montgomery Ward, per Washington State’s historic preservation office.

Sources disagree on how long it lasted. That same office calls it the most frequently built house type in the country between 1903 and 1930, while Glendale, California’s city style guide says it faded fast after the mid-1920s.

Both hold up. A style that led across 27 years can still be shrinking by 1925.

Art Deco itself ran on two price tiers. The Met describes Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s furniture as prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest. The V&A’s Art Deco in the home collection, meanwhile, runs from handcrafted writing desks to affordable factory-made tea services.

Modernists wanted no part of the ornament. Le Corbusier’s 1925 pavilion stripped it out in favor of reinforced concrete and steel (Museo Reina Sofia), and Marcel Breuer built his first tubular steel armchair that year, inspired by his bicycle’s handlebars (MoMA).

Revival houses were mostly about nostalgia, and the nicknames show it. Indiana Landmarks notes that Tudor Revival earned the name “Stockbroker Tudor” among the upper-middle class in the early 1920s, and that Bertram Goodhue popularized Spanish Revival.

The indoor half of that style has its own rules, laid out in this guide to Spanish Revival interiors.

Which colors defined 1920s interiors?

It depended on the look. Art Deco rooms ran on black, red and gold lacquer against polished metal, Craftsman rooms took their color from stained wood, and one London drawing room went entirely white in 1927.

Jean Dunand’s lacquerwork was built on black, red and gold, with crushed eggshell inlay supplying a pure white (Phillips auction notes, Galerie Marcel Poil). Eileen Gray’s lacquered screens from the early 1920s sit on a black ground, and MoMA dates its screen to 1922.

Not everything was that dramatic. A mid-1920s Egyptian-style wallpaper at Cooper Hewitt is gray on taupe, with orange as its only color. Craftsman rooms stayed with stained wood tones, carried by the built-in woodwork.

Syrie Maugham pushed the other way. Her all-white drawing room at 213 King’s Road, first shown in 1927, dropped the heavy historical palette for long low sofas, sleek chrome and mirrored screens, in art historian Stephen Calloway’s account.

Texture and mirrors did the work color usually does.

Black against gold, chrome against lacquer. The color scheme of an Art Deco room works through reflection as much as hue.

Materials and finishes in 1920s rooms

Luxury rooms used lacquer, macassar ebony, ivory, sharkskin and chrome. Ordinary homes used oak floors, steel casement windows and linoleum.

Luxury materials in Deco interiors

Lacquer has the longest backstory. Eileen Gray introduced Jean Dunand to her teacher, the Japanese lacquer artist Seizo Sugawara, in 1912 (Phillips), and lacquer figured prominently at the 1925 fair (Furniture History Society).

Exotic veneers were the other big spend. Ruhlmann worked in macassar ebony, amboyna burl, ivory and sharkskin, and his 1919 Chariot sideboard sets ivory inlay into macassar ebony (The Globe and Mail; Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Chrome and tubular steel belonged to the modernists. Marcel Breuer made his first tubular steel armchair in 1925 (MoMA).

Finish dates for that chair vary by museum. MoMA dates its chrome-plated B3 model to 1927 and 1928, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts notes that Breuer’s earliest chairs were nickel-plated.

Ivory complicates authentic pieces. Under the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2016 final rule, interstate sales are limited to proven antiques at least 100 years old that meet further criteria, with a narrow exception for items holding under 200 grams of ivory that also meet other conditions (TRAFFIC).

A piece made in 1925 passed the 100-year line in 2025. One made in 1929 does not until 2029, and the seller carries the burden of proof.

Museums feel the same pressure. When the Ruhlmann retrospective moved from the Met to Montreal in 2004, some of the more delicate pieces stayed home, and a few were refused entry over their ivory and tortoiseshell trim, according to The Globe and Mail.

Practical materials in ordinary homes

Oak was one of the most popular flooring choices of the decade.

The same catalogs Architect magazine reviewed list plenty else a buyer could order, including steel casement windows, built-in kitchen cabinetry, colored bathroom fixtures promoted by Kohler and lighting fixtures chosen to match the house style.

Linoleum was already a common kitchen flooring by the 1930s, a Canadian museum record notes.

Wealthier clients treated the floor as a design surface, with inlay patterns on Art Deco floors replacing plain boards.

Geometric motifs and surface patterns

Chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts, stepped forms and stylized florals made up the Art Deco vocabulary, while Craftsman rooms put their pattern in a foliate frieze.

Chevrons and zigzags usually showed up as low-relief geometric bands in metalwork and borders, according to a Buffalo architecture archive on local Art Deco buildings. Stepped forms copied the silhouettes of the skyscrapers going up in Manhattan (High Museum), with Mesoamerican pyramids as an older source (Art Deco Society).

Symmetry sat under all of it. The same Buffalo archive sums the style up as sleek, linear and symmetrical.

Sunbursts reached skyscraper scale at the decade’s end. The Chrysler Building, built between 1928 and 1930, has a crown clad in stainless steel arranged in a radiating sunburst pattern (Britannica).

At room scale the same fan shape works as a repeat, as this guide to the sunburst motif in Art Deco shows.

Florals took a different route. Paul Poiret’s school, Atelier Martine, turned drawings of flowers, fruits and animals into drapery, carpets and wallcoverings, and one large-scale bloom in the Cooper Hewitt collection is printed in flat pink, purple and green on brown.

That flat-color treatment is the root of Art Deco’s stylized floral patterns. Paul Dumas, who worked for Atelier Martine, printed a ca. 1925 pattern that also hung as wallpaper at the 1925 exposition, per Cooper Hewitt.

Craftsman rooms put pattern higher up. With so much woodwork on the walls, the frieze was often the only surface left to decorate, and its geometric, foliate or abstract-landscape patterns ran in muted greens, browns, deep blue-greys, russet and gold, according to Arts and Crafts Homes magazine.

Roughly speaking, Deco repeated geometry where Craftsman repeated leaves.

Furniture and lighting that defined the decade

Furniture split into two camps. Wealthy clients got carved and veneered Art Deco pieces, and industry got tubular steel or painted-wood modernist designs. Lighting split along the same line, between hand-finished glass and iron on one side and plainer working fixtures on the other.

Furniture

The dates matter here, which is why they sit in the table.

Frankl skipped the 1925 Paris fair on purpose, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston explains. A bookcase he built to tame the clutter in his cabin copied the stepped profile of New York’s skyscrapers almost by accident, which is my favorite bit of trivia from the whole decade.

He also rejected standardized mass production, the High Museum notes, so his skyscraper line stayed close to hand work.

Mies designed the Barcelona chair for the German Pavilion at the 1929 exposition, and only two were made for the pavilion itself. MoMA records production continuing since 1929, apart from a 16-year gap.

Perriand’s 1927 Bar sous le toit, built from steel, glass and aluminum, got her hired by Le Corbusier. The tubular steel line that followed used materials rarely seen in domestic settings, per Architect magazine.

The Deco side of the split is covered in the main characteristics of Art Deco furniture.

Lighting and mirrors

Molded glass was René Lalique’s territory. Much of his output was lighting equipment and interior detail, with iced surfaces and relief patterns (Britannica), and the Corning Museum of Glass holds his 1922 glass fish lit from a bronze base.

Edgar Brandt did the wrought iron. He made lamps, consoles and sconces, and worked with Lalique and Sèvres on glass and ceramic mounts, according to the Met.

Ruhlmann handled crystal and porcelain. His ca. 1925 crystal and silvered-metal chandelier is one example, and his 1927 white Sèvres vase lamp is another, one of eight, six of which were made for the liner Île de France (Met press release).

Mirrors stayed small. Cooper Hewitt describes a ca. 1925 Brandt mirror and console in wrought iron, marble and mirrored glass as petite and suited to apartment living, and notes that Brandt spurred a revival of iron furnishings across the decade.

Room-by-room guide to 1920s interiors

Each room told a different part of the story, from the radio in the living room to the color in the bathroom.

Living and dining rooms

In city rooms, the radio moved in. The National Capital Radio and Television Museum notes that cabinet design became a design problem once families brought “furniture that talks” into living rooms in the mid-1920s.

Craftsman rooms were organized around the fireplace and inglenook, and Stickley called the dining room the center of hospitality, according to the Gustav Stickley House Foundation.

One room, one anchor. A radio console suits either look; a Deco chandelier over Craftsman woodwork does not.

Bedrooms

Bedrooms are where the two looks pulled furthest apart.

At the 1925 fair, Ruhlmann’s Hôtel d’un Collectionneur staged a model interior for a hypothetical wealthy connoisseur, with the Lasalle commode in the bedroom, a form nearly identical to the Collette commode that Cooper Hewitt says his firm sold in walnut, amboyna, burr ash or mahogany.

Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman, digitized by the University of Wisconsin libraries, sketched a typical bedroom in soft gray-blue with white enameled woodwork and wicker and silver-gray maple furniture.

Kitchens

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen was installed in roughly 10,000 kitchens in the late 1920s, according to MoMA.

It came with a revolving stool, a gas stove, built-in storage with labeled aluminum bins, a foldaway ironing board and an adjustable ceiling light.

The unit measured around 6.5 square meters (Vielfalt der Moderne) and was planned around one cook, so two people could not work in it, per Architectuul.

The V&A is careful about the claim. It was not the first fitted kitchen, only the first made in quantity.

Bathrooms

Before the 1920s, bathrooms were “sanitary white,” a legacy of the late 19th-century germ scare (Arts and Crafts Homes). From about 1920 to 1940 colorful bathrooms appeared, including in bungalows, though the magazine notes they were not strictly Arts and Crafts.

In 1928, Kohler and Crane followed the Universal Sanitary Manufacturing Company, the first maker of colored fixtures, per the Hagley Library (Kohler’s own history puts its first colors in 1927).

Architect magazine’s catalog review credits Kohler with promoting colored fixtures, while Hagley dates its entry to 1928. The two fit together. Kohler led the promotion without being first.

At the top of the market, Ruhlmann’s 1920 design for a bathroom pairs a marble dressing table and gold mosaic with a sunken marble tub, and Cooper Hewitt says only the very elite could have afforded it.

How to recreate the 1920s look today

Pick one look per room, build the palette around the room’s fixed surfaces, anchor the space with one statement piece and add a single pattern layer. Everything else is accent.

1. Read the house first. Original woodwork, built-ins and fireplaces decide which look fits.
2. Choose Craftsman, Art Deco, period revival or modernist for the room, and don’t blend them.
3. Set the palette from the fixed surfaces (floors, trim and ceiling), then pick the wall color around them.
4. Place one anchor piece, such as a statement cabinet, chair or mirror.
5. Add one pattern layer in wallpaper, a rug or tile, not all of them.
6. Light the room in layers, starting with the ceiling fixture and adding sconces or table lamps.
7. Finish with reflective accents like mirror, chrome or glass.

For step three, a list of popular Art Deco paint colors narrows the shortlist before you buy sample pots.

For step six, size the ceiling fixture first. A chandelier size calculator turns room dimensions into a starting diameter.

Licensed reproductions are the simpler route for modernist pieces, and Knoll’s Barcelona chair is the standard example. The sources disagree on the dates, though. Dezeen puts the start of Knoll’s licensed production in 1947, while Knoll’s own pages date Mies’s licensing of his furniture to 1945 and the formal Barcelona chair rights to 1953. Check the year before you quote it.

When the 1920s look does not work

Small, dark rooms are the obvious problem. Paint light reflectance value runs from 0 for black to 100 for white (Ideal Home), and deep Deco colors sit near the bottom. A black-and-gold scheme in a room with little daylight needs mirrors, metal and strong artificial light to carry it.

Mixing looks is the other classic mistake. The V&A notes that by the mid-1930s Art Deco was derided as a gaudy, false image of luxury, and stacking every motif in one room invites the same verdict.

Original fixtures with old wiring need care. Antique Lamp Supply warns that cord insulation turns brittle and older lamps can lack insulation, and that selling fixtures without UL approval is legal. DesignDash adds lead-based solder and paint in fixtures made before the 1970s and asbestos in some socket insulation.

Most vintage fixtures can be restored and certified after refurbishment, DesignDash notes, so the wiring problem is a cost, not a dead end.

Woodwork that already commits to a style is the last case. In a Craftsman house, stained trim and built-ins set the look, and Deco chrome against them reads as costume.

None of this ends the look. It only sets the order. Fix light and wiring first, then choose pieces.

1920s Interior Design Style FAQ

How is Art Deco different from Art Nouveau?

Art Nouveau came first and favored sinuous, organic lines, while Art Deco swapped them for geometry, symmetry and machine-age materials.

Both prized craftsmanship. Deco simply put it into straight edges, stepped forms and polished metal.

Why did the luxury look fade in the 1930s?

The luxury market collapsed. After the Wall Street Crash, the V&A notes, demand shifted to inexpensive goods suited to mass production.

That pulled design away from handcraft and toward new materials.

Can I mix 1920s pieces with modern furniture?

Yes. One period or period-style anchor piece among plain modern furniture works best, because the look depends on a single statement rather than a full set.

Tubular steel and plain-surface modernist designs from the decade already read as modern, so they sit most easily beside new pieces.

How do I decorate a 1920s bungalow?

Start with the woodwork. Keep the stained trim and built-ins, and put pattern in a stenciled frieze above the wainscot.

The Twin Cities Bungalow Club cites an old rule of thumb for stencil height, which is 3 to 5 inches shorter than the frieze itself.

Telling an Original 1920s Piece From a Reproduction

Paperwork settles it before anything else does. Maker’s marks come next, then the materials, the wiring and any ivory documentation.

Paper leads because a 1928 Ruhlmann cabinet sold at Sotheby’s with certificates kept by the atelier and lodged with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs archive (The Saleroom, 2001). That same certificate also supports the age proof the ivory rule demands of sellers.

A missing stamp rules out Brandt’s workshop, not the decade (Rose Uniacke). Lalique’s “R” signature, by contrast, marks pre-1945 production (Dawsons Auctions).

Style alone proves nothing. Reproductions of Art Deco pieces have been made for some time, Christie’s specialist Adam Chadwick told The Art Newspaper in 2001. For the first shortlisting pass, a guide to vintage furniture styles helps.

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Andreea Dima

Andreea Dima is a certified interior designer and the founder of AweDeco, a Bucharest-based interior design studio. Since 2012 she has completed more than 100 residential and commercial projects across Romania and now also offers virtual design consultations for clients abroad. She writes AweDeco’s articles, combining her project experience with manufacturer data and published research.

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