Art Deco is Back with These Luxury London Properties

The 2020s may not have started with a roar to match their equivalent a century ago, what with the world shutting up shop just as the decade began. But as Art Deco design celebrates its 100th birthday this spring — marking the moment it burst onto the scene, with big jazz hands, at the Paris International Exhibition of 1925 — the spirit of an era synonymous with glamour  and possibility can now be seen all over London’s most opulent new homes.

For those bored with the expensively tasteful but fairly forgettable design found in some high-end new schemes — an attempt to appeal to the widest pot of global super-rich buyers who will rarely be in residence — the apartments at The Whiteley, following the  old Art Deco department store’s £1.2bn redevelopment, bring welcome pizzazz.  Behind the majestically columned façade are 139 private apartments, including a special collection by designers including the Joyce Wang Studio and former Soho House Design Director Linda Boronkay. In Wang’s 4,000 sq ft paean to the 1920s — on sale for £17.25m via Knight Frank — it feels like Flapper dresses are the only suitable attire as you lounge beneath the reception room’s six-metre-high ceilings, whose huge windows form part of the building’s original façade.

Inspired by this louche, liberated era’s “larger than life” pattern and ornamentation, Wang describes how she hunted down turn- of-the-century chandeliers for every bedroom and designed super-sized headboards in mohair velvet. “Art Deco is about boldness, luxury and the celebration of modernity. The furniture pieces inside the apartment reflect Art Deco’s emphasis on both form and function,” she comments. Meanwhile, in Boronkay’s homage to this bygone era — it recently sold, with a guide price of £10.95m — the designer wanted to give the impression of a home that has been layered over years by an imaginary owner with a passion for art and literature.

Greek gods adorn a living room screen, one wall is clad in decorative mirrored panels and rich reds and greens sit alongside Carrara marble, fossil oak wood and bronze. In Mayfair, there’s a brand new tribute to this between-the-wars era awash with gin and jazz. On the site where a 1930s mansion block once housed Mirabelle, the restaurant that was frequented by presidents and Hollywood stars, the gleaming white 60 Curzon recreates the seductive aesthetic of this past golden age. “We have embraced the design and cultural identity of the Art Deco movement but tailored it to the architectural and social context of today’s Mayfair,” comments Lee Polisano, founding partner at PLP Architecture, who crafted the Deco-inspired shell with its Portland Stone façade bearing bronze accents and green, hand-glazed terracotta tiles.

“Adventure, energy and cultural exploration defined this transformative era, and a sense of exoticism was portrayed through the style and craft, with luxe materials like walnut and jade and motifs inspired by travel and discovery,” Polisano adds. “We aimed to reclaim a tradition of luxury urban living that had been lost at the end of the last century.” Inside 60 Curzon are 32 boutique residences — some designed by Thierry Despont, the late French designer whose signature Art Deco style is immortalised in Claridge’s hotel. Others have been curated by different designers, including one priced at £10.5m by Tatjana von Stein that feels like you have stepped back in time. While some designers will drop the odd nod to Art Deco into a contemporary space, Von Stein has gone turbo retro.

There are mirrored ceilings and hand-painted decorative walls, lamps and soft furnishings inspired by Oriental imagery, and a centrepiece curving sofa that’s pure Mad Men (Art Deco morphed over the years into Mid-Century Modern). Another of the residences, by the Elicyon design studio, is also an Art Deco lover’s dream, recalling a time when high-society mingling was done amid walnut side tables and mirrored drinks cabinets. In a year in which Pantone tells us the colour that reflects the national mood is Mocha Mousse — a warm, sludgy hug of a shade that apparently reflects our need for connection, comfort and harmony in a world in disarray — all this jazzy, vibrant pre-war design packs quite a punch. You can see tributes to it all over the place.

At Holland Park Gate in Kensington, a new super-prime scheme of residences costing from £2.35m up to £32.5m on the site of an Art Deco cinema, the developers Lodha have recreated the entrance to the old picture palace, surrounded by a stone façade whose waves evoke the heavy curtains that would have once covered the screens. Overlooking Hyde Park in Bayswater, Park Modern — whose residences, largely now all sold, are priced up to £60m for one of the biggest penthouses in London — also exudes old-school glamour with its ribbon-like exterior0 and curving balconies. And the Golden Age of 1920s travel is the theme gorgeously harnessed by developers Berkeley St George at London Dock in Wapping. The showpiece Mauretania Lounge, a residents-only amenity space inspired by  the luxury of cruise liners in the early 20th century, includes a double-height aquarium in the Oceanic Lounge and a plant-peppered Palm Room in which renowned American author F Scott Fitzgerald would have felt utterly at ease sipping a Gin Rickey.

Maybe our reasons for being drawn to Art Deco aren’t as different as they might at first seem, though, to our love of Mocha Mousse. Both are about a hankering for warm, enveloping comfort, in Deco’s case, from a more optimistic time. “Its timeless principles — precision, symmetry and rich materiality — offer a reassuring sense of stability and permanence,” agrees Polisano. Designer Katharine Pooley — who has designed homes in London, Paris and New York that all have an Art Deco interior central to their theme — adds that “there is such a wealth of beauty contained in our collective history, I think we will always look back as  well as forward for inspiration. But Art Deco reminds people of a more glamorous and in some ways simpler era. The familiarity of Art Deco still captivates people with its beauty and perhaps a degree of this is escapism.” Her furniture designers, Pooley adds, often use a touch of Art Deco in their bespoke bars, billiards tables, desks and screens.

“For one client overseas, we created an incredible Art Deco-style study in shades of black and  gold with beautiful sculptural pendants, all pulled together by a hand-painted copper wallpaper of cranes flying. The final effect  was transportive and cocooning.” Demand for Art Deco furnishings is on the rise, according to Juliette Thomas, whose company Juliettes Interiors specialises in manufacturing and selling furniture from the era. “Customers often don’t realise that it’s  Art Deco,” she says, “but it’s a style that has never dated at the high end.” Her clients will pay handsomely, too, for a statement piece such as a large built-in glossy Italian bedroom wardrobe, priced £68,250, or several thousand pounds for Deco dressing tables, console tables and round-backed chairs.

French company La Manufacture Cogolin, founded in 1924 at the height of the Jazz Age,  is a great example of how Art Deco defies age and moves with the times. The atelier provided handmade rugs on the 1930s cruise liner SS Normandie, whose interiors by architect Pierre Patout were considered the apogee  of Art Deco luxury. Fast-forward a century and the company has been busy creating similarly Deco-inspired floor adornments on Daniel Craig’s latest film, Queer. Sarah Henry, La Manufacture Cogolin’s managing director, points out that today’s financial insecurity and ongoing wars provide a very different backdrop to the mood of post-WW1 exuberance that gave birth to the the Art Deco movement. “But even if we are not in the party mood of the roaring 1920s,” says Henry, “there are still many Art Deco codes, especially the rounded edges of cruise-ship style that are very present in contemporary furniture, that resonate today.” In some of London’s prime new homes, maybe you will hear that roar after all.