Art Deco Interior Design
Art Deco Flooring: Stunning Inlay Patterns to Know
Design roundups tend to favor wood when they talk about Art Deco floors, but the best-documented survivors are terrazzo. Miami Beach’s Sovereign Hotel restored its original 1941 lobby floor and revealed coral and white terrazzo with green inlays (Breaking Travel News, 2004).
The National Terrazzo and Mosaic Association dates the American boom to the 1920s, when architects discovered terrazzo’s design potential for Art Deco (NTMA, 2023).
The inlay itself sets contrasting materials flush into the surface as stylized geometric motifs. Chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts, stepped forms and Greek key turn up most, usually as borders or medallions, and now and then as a repeat across the whole floor.
What counts as an inlay pattern in Art Deco flooring?
Anything from the 1920s and 1930s where one material is set into another and sits flush with the surface qualifies, whether it’s wood, stone, terrazzo or linoleum.
People swap the related terms around all the time, and they don’t mean the same thing.
- Inlay is the broad term. It covers pieces of one material set into a recess or field of another, flush with the surface (wood, brass, stone, linoleum).
- Parquetry is inlay laid in geometric patterns, with the contrast coming from opposing grain angles. Herringbone is the most common flooring layout (Carters glossary).
- Marquetry uses cut veneer pieces assembled into pictures or ornament. At Eltham Palace it clad the entrance hall walls rather than the floor (Dezeen, 2025).
- Printed or patterned tile only imitates inlay. It’s a flat surface with no separate pieces to cut or set.
Art Deco rooms don’t treat the floor as a neutral base. It’s a designed surface, with a border framing a field and usually a focal point somewhere inside it. That thread runs through Art Deco interior design as a whole, where the floor gets the same compositional attention as the walls.
The same geometric shapes found in Art Deco interiors repeat on ceilings, and on doors and wall panels too. A floor inlay rarely stands alone in an original room.
Where did Art Deco floor inlay motifs come from?
The motifs came out of the 1925 Paris exposition that named the style and the Egyptian Revival that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Cubist geometry then got laid over much older parquet habits.
The 1925 Paris exposition
About 15 million visitors saw roughly 15,000 exhibits at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many other sources put attendance above 16 million.
The style takes its name from that show, though elements existed from the 1910s and the label itself came later. Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education describes the break with Art Nouveau as clean lines and shiny surfaces replacing rounded organic forms.
Egyptian Revival after 1922
Tutankhamun’s tomb set off the largest Egyptian revival of the 1920s, and that wave carried straight into Art Deco.
Stepped outlines and lotus forms entered Deco ornament that way. Hunker’s survey of Deco floors points to stepped forms underfoot in elegant foyers of the 1920s and 1930s, and the way stepped forms run through Art Deco architecture shows how one silhouette moved between facade and floor.
Cubism and the parquet tradition
Chevron parquet is the inherited part. It goes back to 17th-century France, where a room at Versailles used it in place of the panel layout now called parquet de Versailles (Moduleo).
What was new came with fragmented geometry, hard contrast and strict symmetry, and The Modern House (2019) lists Cubism among the influences.
Art Deco inlay is largely old parquet craft rearranged into new geometry.
Which motifs define Art Deco floor inlay?
Chevron and zigzag run in lines. Sunbursts and fans radiate from a point, and stepped forms and Greek key repeat along edges. Those six motifs do most of the work.
Chevron and zigzag
Chevron comes from angled boards or blocks meeting along a center line, which makes repeated V shapes. You see it mostly in wood fields. A zigzag is just one continuous angular line, normally a border band.
Chevron is the easiest motif to start with in wood. The longer story of chevron patterns in Art Deco shows how far the shape traveled beyond floors.
Sunburst and fan
Both radiate from one point. A sunburst runs its rays around a full circle, while a fan is a half or quarter arc of the same rays. Either way the segments need tight miters where they meet.
The Chrysler Building’s terraced spire forms a stylized sunburst (Take Walks), so the floor motif repeats a shape already on the skyline. The sunburst motif’s reach across Art Deco design explains why a floor version feels tied to the facade outside.
Stepped forms and Greek key
Stepped forms read as small pyramid silhouettes along bands and medallion edges, and Greek key adds a rectilinear meander.
Eltham Palace’s dining room carries Greek key on its black lacquered doors as a typical Art Deco geometric (Dezeen, 2025). Pavex Parquet sells it as a handcrafted border inlay for solid hardwood installations (Archello).
One catch. Pavex lists its Victorian II border for solid, unfinished floors only, so engineered boards rule some border inlays out.
Wood, stone, terrazzo, linoleum and brass: which materials carried the patterns
Brass did the line work between everything else. The rest of the palette was wood in contrasting species, marble, terrazzo and linoleum.
| Material | Typical pairing | Where it appears | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wood | Oak with walnut | Borders and parquet fields | Species differ in hardness and movement |
| Marble | Black and white stone with brass | Foyers and lobbies | Scratches and etches with wear |
| Terrazzo | Colored chips split by metal strips | Foyers and lobbies | Cement terrazzo cracks without divider strips |
| Linoleum | Contrasting sheet colors | Fields and cut-in borders | Softer surface, dents under heavy loads |
| Brass | Stone, terrazzo or wood | Line work between materials | Tarnishes and wears flush with use |
Wood species pairings
The standard layout puts one species in the main field and a contrasting species in the border, a method the NWFA and Market Insights Torcivia still list among current trends. A house at Hyde Park Square in London pairs long narrow oak strips with a bold dark walnut border (Houzz).
Contrast carries the whole effect, so the logic of contrast in interior design applies here. Tone, not only color, is what separates border from field.
The contrast reads from across the room with no extra material, which is the appeal. The catch is that species differ in hardness and seasonal movement, so a border can wear or gap at a different rate than the field.
Stone, terrazzo and brass strips
By 1926, 60 contractor firms had joined the National Terrazzo and Mosaic Association, formed in Chicago three years earlier (NTMA, 2023).
The association ties that growth to Art Deco, saying the industry took off in the 1920s once architects saw what terrazzo could do for Deco designs.
On divider strips, NTMA’s own history notes European patents for metal strips as far back as 1893. It says Louis Del Turco of Del Turco and Bros. had obtained a U.S. patent for metal dividers by 1921, and his 1924 handbook records the method as already established. The sources agree that the strip predates the Art Deco boom and that the boom made it a design tool.
NTMA sets the working rules. The metal is usually brass, with copper or zinc chosen for color. Traditional cement terrazzo needs strips about every 4 ft by 4 ft to counter movement and shrinkage that cause cracking. Epoxy terrazzo is the exception and can be poured with no strips at all.
The grid exists to stop cracks. Deco designers turned it into line work, which NTMA’s article frames as making an aesthetic virtue of a functional necessity.
TileBar’s Art Deco collection by Vanessa Deleon shows the modern stone version, with 24 by 24 inch tiles in Nero Marquina, white Carrara and Thassos marble plus brass inlay (RDD Magazine).
Inlaid linoleum
Armstrong’s first linoleum came out of its Lancaster, Pennsylvania plant in 1908 (Hagley Museum).
Armstrong stopped making linoleum in the mid-1970s and returned in 1998 by buying DLW. Forbo’s Marmoleum, built from linseed oil, wood flour, limestone, resin and jute, is one current source.
It’s a softer surface than wood or stone, so heavy furniture leaves dents.
Line the dates up and the picture is clear enough. Armstrong was making linoleum in 1908 and the terrazzo association formed in 1923, two years before the Paris exposition in 1925. The look came from Paris, and the trades were already equipped to build it.
Where do inlays sit in an Art Deco room?
Inlays tend to land in one of a few places.
- A border frames the field along the walls with a contrasting band.
- Medallions are self-contained motifs, usually at the center of a foyer or lobby floor.
- Threshold bands are insets at a doorway or hall that mark a change of space.
- A full-field repeat, such as chevron, carries one pattern across the whole floor.
A zigzag band suits a border because it runs as one continuous line along the edge, much like the zigzag patterns common in Art Deco design. UK floor-sanding firm Mr Sander advises slimmer borders in compact rooms so the band does not crowd the field.
A medallion becomes the room’s focal point, so it sits on the center line of the space and stays symmetrical. Complex terrazzo shapes arrive ready to set, since three NTMA divider strip member companies supply waterjet cutting to contractors.
For thresholds, a Tampa Bay Times column by designer Chip Vogel (2011) describes a diamond parquetry square inset into a small hallway. The inlay wood was prestained dark before the whole floor was sanded and varnished, and his rule is that an inlay should accent an architectural detail or it reads as random.
Full-field repeats trade the focal point for rhythm.
My rule of thumb is to choose a field repeat when the room has no natural center, and a border or medallion when it does.
Which Art Deco buildings still show inlaid floors?
The best-documented survivors are terrazzo lobbies, including the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building in New York and Miami Beach hotels such as the Sovereign, La Flora and Victor. The floors on record are terrazzo, not wood.
| Building | Floor on record | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Chrysler Building, New York | Lobby floor surfaces, protected in the 1978 interior landmark | NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission |
| Empire State Building, New York | Buffed gray-and-lilac terrazzo in the lobby | Architectural Record |
| Sovereign Hotel, Miami Beach | Coral and white terrazzo with green inlays, 1941 | Breaking Travel News, 2004 |
| La Flora Hotel, Miami Beach | Multi-colored terrazzo in the lobby and on the porch | Miami Design Preservation League survey |
| Victor Hotel, Miami Beach | Two-colored terrazzo with square designs, 1937 | Miami Design Preservation League survey |
New York landmarks
The 1978 interior landmark designation for the Chrysler Building lists floor surfaces among the protected parts of the ground floor, next to lighting fixtures, walls and ceiling (NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission).
The Empire State Building’s lobby floors are buffed gray-and-lilac terrazzo, according to Architectural Record, and the interior became a landmark in 1981.
Facades get most of the attention in lists of famous Art Deco buildings, yet the floors worth studying sit in lobbies like these.
Miami Beach hotels
At the Sovereign Hotel, a 1941 lobby floor was ground, repaired and polished until the coral and white terrazzo with green inlays showed again (Breaking Travel News, 2004). The WinterHaven Hotel reopened in 2000 after a one-year restoration, with preservationists praising its terrazzo floors (Hotel Online). Just inside the entrance of the Beacon Hotel there’s a multi-colored terrazzo design.
The Beacon and La Flora entries come from Miami Design Preservation League survey records, which log terrazzo designs building by building.
For a floor with a documented Art Deco pedigree, terrazzo is the safer reference than wood.
How is Art Deco inlay cut and set?
Both trades end up with an inlay level with the floor around it, though they get there differently. Terrazzo is built wet and ground flat. Wood is set dry into a routed cavity and sanded flush.
Period methods
Besides Art Deco demand, NTMA credits divider strips and electric grinding machines for the 1920s terrazzo boom.
The topping goes on full above the strips and is then ground down to the finished surface, a sequence written into the Department of Veterans Affairs terrazzo guide specification.
Modern cutting methods
Hand-cut work is still done by specialists, at a steep price, according to Tim Carter of Ask the Builder. Computer-controlled machinery has lowered costs enough that inlaid borders and medallions now go into new and existing floors (Ask the Builder). James Dulley’s syndicated column makes the same point about reduced labor.
Setting a wood border inlay
The steps below draw on Wood Floor Business, Hardwood Floors magazine (2020) and This Old House.
- Sand and flatten the field first, so the router does not catch on high or low boards.
- Find fasteners with a stud or nail finder and mark them before cutting.
- Fix the template or trace the shape, then rout the cavity in passes.
- Dry-fit the piece and confirm it lifts back out (blue tape or suction cups work).
- Spread adhesive on the cavity floor and walls, then tap the piece in with a block.
- Leave it a hair proud, about 1/32 inch, so the sander does the final leveling.
- Let the adhesive cure, then sand flush and finish with the rest of the floor.
Cutting across a tongue-and-groove joint makes the router work harder, so plan the line over solid wood. Sanding before the adhesive cures leaves bubbles in the finish, and a medallion has to drop in vertically with no sideways tilt.
How much does an inlaid Art Deco floor cost?
A professionally installed wood border typically costs $20 to $30 per foot, and borders and medallions overall run from several hundred dollars to several thousand. The number depends mostly on species and pattern complexity, and on whether the piece is premade.
- James Dulley’s column puts an installed border at $20 to $30 per foot, higher with rarer wood or complex patterns.
- Two border patterns in one homeowner’s own family room came to $20 and $40 per linear foot, installed and finished (Ask the Builder).
- Borders and medallions overall run from several hundred to several thousand dollars (Ask the Builder).
- A premade medallion takes a few hours to install with the factory router template (This Old House).
What moves the price
Inlaid wood materials are expensive, so species matters. A narrow ornate border or a premade medallion keeps cost under control. When a floor is replaced outright, border patterns designed to fit standard tongue-and-groove boards conserve exotic wood (Dulley). Every added motif also adds cutting and fitting time.
Terrazzo and stone
Published terrazzo prices vary too widely to quote responsibly. In terrazzo the cost follows the divider strips, since each line of brass or zinc is a material and labor item, so a busy medallion costs more than a plain field.
The only dependable number is a contractor quote built on measured square footage. Run the room dimensions through a flooring calculator before asking, so the quote covers the right area.
To place the floor inside the wider project budget, a home renovation cost calculator shows what the rest of the work adds.
Restoring original inlay or installing a reproduction
Restore when the original survives, and reproduce only when it does not. Restoration keeps the original fabric and its patina, while a reproduction gives full control over matching and materials.
Restoring wood inlay
Conservators treat sanding as a last resort. Building Conservation notes that sanding destroys the patina wood develops over years of wear, and that damaged parquet panels and marquetry borders can be replaced with matching antique timbers instead.
The US General Services Administration’s repair procedures follow the same logic. A dutchman repair keeps as much original material as possible, and replacement parquet pieces must match size, type, thickness and species.
Pieces salvaged from closets or from under radiators come first. When those run out, reclaimed wood supplies the closest match in species and tone.
Restoring terrazzo inlay
Regrinding removes a thin layer, so GSA procedures allow it only on approval from the regional historic preservation officer. GSA’s terrazzo repair specification also says to avoid grinding divider strips and to take care near coated ones. Original plans often hold the exact terrazzo mix, and patches match the existing aggregate and matrix in color, size and texture.
The two trades start from opposite defaults, since conservators of timber floors avoid sanding while terrazzo specifications accept controlled regrinding.
When a reproduction is the better call
A reproduction is allowed where no landmark protection applies. The lobby at 50 Rockefeller Plaza was unprotected, so Studio Mellone replaced its chequerboard stone floor with black terrazzo criss-crossed with brass (Wallpaper magazine). It also gives you full control over material and layout.
In protected interiors the picture changes, because changes need commission approval, as the Empire State Building lobby team found with the Landmarks Preservation Commission (artdeco.org). Matching old stone is hard too, and finding marble to match the original stonework was especially challenging in that same lobby.
In Miami Beach, the Miami Design Preservation League led the preservation push behind the district’s 1979 National Register listing (Miami and Beaches tourism board).
In Britain, the Twentieth Century Society formed in 1979 as the Thirties Society, and London’s Art Deco Firestone Factory was demolished on the eve of listing the following year (C20 Society).
When inlay is the wrong choice for a floor
Inlay fails on thin floors, radiant-heat floors, uneven subfloors and surfaces that sit under rugs. In those cases a plain floor with one good border is the better buy.
- Boards thinner than 3/8 inch cannot take a solid-wood medallion (This Old House).
- One medallion maker’s installation instructions advise against installing over radiant heat.
- On an uneven subfloor the router catches on high and low boards, and NWFA’s April 2026 concrete subfloor sheet sets the slab limit at 3/16 inch within 10 feet (or 1/8 inch within 6 feet).
- Dulley recommends medallions only where rugs will not cover them.
Scale is the quiet failure. A motif sized for a grand foyer crowds a hallway, which is the lesson behind scale and proportion in interior design.
Carter writes that inlay products cannot be installed easily by a rookie or even a serious do-it-yourselfer.
Full-field custom inlay rarely earns its price. A narrow ornate border or a premade medallion delivers most of the effect for a fraction of the cost.
FAQ About Inlay Patterns in Art Deco Flooring
Can a kitchen or bathroom floor carry Art Deco inlay?
Tile, stone and terrazzo all work. Wood is the risk in wet rooms, since one engineered flooring maker’s 2024 installation guide does not recommend its product for bathrooms or other high-moisture installations.
How does Streamline Moderne flooring differ from Art Deco inlay?
Streamline Moderne replaced much of Art Deco’s angular ornament in the mid-1930s with smoother, more functional forms.
Both styles favored terrazzo, where divider strips allowed straight or curved lines.
Is a stained or painted pattern a substitute for inlay?
Only partly. Designer Chip Vogel notes that a skilled hand can stain or paint a pattern onto an existing wood floor (Tampa Bay Times, 2011).
That skips the routing and the species movement, but it’s a surface treatment, not inlay.
How should brass divider strips in terrazzo be cleaned?
Clean them with the terrazzo, and stay away from cleaners that contain alkalies, acids or other strong ingredients. Steel wool is out because it rusts and stains.
GSA maintenance guidance adds that new terrazzo gets scrubbed several times a week and mopped on the remaining days.
Can inlay be added to an existing wood floor?
Yes. The installer routs a channel into the old boards with a template and glues the inlay in.
The whole floor is then finished with urethane, according to James Dulley’s syndicated column.
Do inlay patterns suit a small or modern room?
They do, as long as the motif is scaled to the space. Hunker’s survey of Deco-inspired remodels shows a small kitchen using an inlay tile pattern in an otherwise simple black and white room.
What to Check Before Committing to Art Deco Floor Inlay
Before committing to inlay patterns in Art Deco flooring, check floor thickness and subfloor flatness, then test on a small area.
Thickness comes first because a thin floor ends the job before money is spent. This Old House advises cutting a small piece from the medallion’s spot and sending it to the maker.
For flatness, NWFA’s April 2026 concrete subfloor sheet defers to the flooring and adhesive manufacturer’s substrate requirements, so the check uses that maker’s limit.
Both trades test a sample first. Wood sends a cutout to the maker, and the General Services Administration requires a 20 square foot cleaning mockup of each terrazzo type on historic floors.
Once the floor is settled, the Art Deco color palette guides which wall and trim tones suit its wood or stone.
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