Art Deco was one of the most influential styles to sweep across Europe in the 1920s. Its reach extended far beyond architecture, leaving its mark on film, fashion, design, and the arts at large. One of the movement's defining moments came with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, held in Paris in 1925 - the very event that gave the style its name.
In architecture, Art Deco bridges tradition and modernity, drawing on an unusually wide material palette: prized ivory, jade, and lacquer among them. The style also absorbed influences from distant Eastern traditions - Japan, China, Egypt - with hints of Cubism, bold color, and abstract form woven throughout.
Art Deco borrowed its decorative composition from the Beaux-Arts architectural tradition - clean vertical lines, layered facades, and the classic tripartite division. But it brought something distinctly its own to the mix: rationality paired with ornament.
For both Europeans and Americans, Art Deco was a revelation. By the 1930s, the style had worked its way into the surrounding architecture and even into the interiors of bourgeois apartments.
As it reached the masses, Art Deco grew more restrained - sturdier materials like concrete and steel entered the picture. This period produced the style's most iconic landmarks: the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building. These buildings transformed the New York skyline into the one we recognize today, defined by crisp straight lines, sharp angles, and reinforced concrete. The Chrysler Building's crown is arguably the single most photographed piece of Art Deco anywhere - a stainless-steel sunburst that was, at the time, a genuinely radical engineering choice, and it remains the clearest visual shorthand for the entire movement.
New York wasn't alone in embracing Art Deco. Rio de Janeiro holds its own significant examples that capture the style's essence - the Teatro Carlos Gomes and Rio's Central Station among them. But the movement's single most famous work, in Brazil and worldwide, remains the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
Art Deco brought together a striking range of forms and became a substantial chapter in the history of architecture and the arts. It balanced past and present, adding new elements that were entirely its own.
Why Art Deco Is Back
A century after its Paris debut, Art Deco is having a genuine moment again - and not just as a nostalgia trend. In Seattle, buyers renovating pre-war apartments and condos are increasingly asking for interiors that lean into the building's original bones rather than fight them: brass fixtures, fluted paneling, geometric tile work, and lighting that reads as sculptural rather than purely functional. In Kyiv, the same shift is happening from the opposite direction - new-build apartments are borrowing Art Deco's confident geometry and material contrast as a way to feel established and considered rather than generic.
Part of the appeal is practical. Art Deco's core vocabulary - symmetry, defined zones, strong verticals - translates well into modern layouts without requiring a full historical pastiche. A kitchen doesn't need hand-carved detailing to read as Art Deco; a bold black-and-brass color story, a stepped ceiling profile, or a sunburst mirror can carry the reference on their own.
deZZign's Approach
At deZZign, we treat Art Deco less as a fixed look to replicate and more as a set of design principles: rationality paired with ornament, exactly as the movement's original architects understood it. That means the structural planning comes first - symmetry, proportion, and zoning - and the decorative layer, whether brass inlay or a geometric feature wall, gets built on top of a plan that already works.
For furniture and material sourcing that matches this level of detail, we work in partnership with SV-Group, whose catalog of Italian and European pieces gives us the kind of material precision - lacquered finishes, exotic veneers, hardware detailing - that Art Deco interiors depend on. It's the same reasoning the original architects had access to nearly a century ago: the style lives or dies on material quality, not just geometry on paper.
A Material Philosophy, Not Just a Look
Art Deco's fondness for eye-catching, high-quality materials connects it to a broader idea we come back to often at deZZign: buildings and interiors that age visibly, and well. The Chrysler Building's crown wasn't stainless steel by accident - its architects wanted a material that would hold its shine and its sharp geometric folds for decades, a way of designing for age rather than against it. We explore that same idea from a different material angle in our piece on copper-clad architecture, where buildings in Manhattan and Copenhagen are deliberately designed to patinate over time - proof that a building's material choice can be part of its story for decades, not just its opening week.
Whether the reference is a full apartment renovation or a single statement room, Art Deco rewards the same thing it always has: getting the underlying structure right before adding the ornament on top.
