Art Deco, sometimes referred to as Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture and design that first appeared in France just before World War I. Art Deco influenced the design of buildings, furniture, jewelry, fashion, cars, movie theatres, trains, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name, short for Arts Décoratifs, from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes held in Paris in 1925. It combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.
The Breakers is a Gilded Age mansion located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island. It was built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family. The 70-room mansion, with a gross area of 125,339 square feet (11,644.4 m2) and 62,482 square feet (5,804.8 m2) of living area on five floors, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the Renaissance Revival style; the interior decor was by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman Jr. The Ochre Point Avenue entrance is marked by sculpted iron gates, and the 30-foot-high (9.1 m) walkway gates are part of a 12-foot-high (3.7 m) limestone-and-iron fence that borders the property on all but the ocean side. The footprint of the house covers approximately 1 acre (4,000 m2) or 43,000 square feet of the 14 acres (5.7 ha) estate on the cliffs overlooking Easton Bay of the Atlantic Ocean.
Interior design is the art and science of enhancing the interior of a building to achieve a healthier and more aesthetically pleasing environment for the people using the space. An interior designer is someone who plans, researches, coordinates, and manages such enhancement projects. Interior design is a multifaceted profession that includes conceptual development, space planning, site inspections, programming, research, communicating with the stakeholders of a project, construction management, and execution of the design.
W. & J. Sloane was a prominent furniture and rug store in New York City that catered to the prominent, including the White House and the Breakers, and wealthy, including the Rockefeller, Whitney, and Vanderbilt families.
Rosecliff, built 1898–1902, is one of the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, now open to the public as a historic house museum. The house has also been known as the Hermann Oelrichs House or the J. Edgar Monroe House.
Syrie Maugham was a leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and 1930s and best known for popularizing rooms decorated entirely in white.
Florence Marguerite Knoll Bassett was an American architect, interior designer, furniture designer, and entrepreneur who has been credited with revolutionizing office design and bringing modernist design to office interiors. Knoll and her husband, Hans Knoll, built Knoll Associates into a leader in the fields of furniture and interior design. She worked to professionalize the field of interior design, fighting against gendered stereotypes of the decorator. She is known for her open office designs, populated with modernist furniture and organized rationally for the needs of office workers. Her modernist aesthetic was known for clean lines and clear geometries that were humanized with textures, organic shapes, and colour.
Louis-Jean-Sylvestre Majorelle, usually known simply as Louis Majorelle, was a French decorator and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs, in the French tradition of the ébéniste. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in the Art Nouveau style, and after 1901 formally served as one of the vice-presidents of the École de Nancy.
Ogden Codman Jr. was an American architect and interior decorator in the Beaux-Arts styles, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design.
Marble House a Gilded Age mansion located at 596 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, was built from 1888 to 1892 as a summer cottage for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt and was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the Beaux Arts style. It was unparalleled in opulence for an American house when it was completed in 1892. Its temple-front portico resembles that of the White House.
The firm of Herter Brothers,, was founded by German immigrants Gustave (1830–1898) and Christian Herter (1839–1883) in New York City. It began as a furniture and upholstery shop/warehouse, but after the Civil War became one of the first American firms to provide complete interior decoration services. With their own design office and cabinet-making and upholstery workshops, Herter Brothers could provide every aspect of interior furnishing—including decorative paneling, mantels, wall and ceiling decoration, patterned floors, carpets and draperies.
Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 19-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1793), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow.
The William K. Vanderbilt House, also known as the Petit Chateau, was a Châteauesque mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was next door to the Triple Palace of William Henry Vanderbilt, which occupied the entire block between 51st and 52nd Streets on the west side of Fifth Avenue.
The Cornelius Vanderbilt II House was a large mansion built in 1883 at 1 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City. It occupied the frontage along the west side of Fifth Avenue from West 57th Street up to West 58th Street at Grand Army Plaza. The home was sold in 1926 and demolished to make way for the Bergdorf Goodman department store.
The Decoration of Houses, a manual of interior design written by Edith Wharton with architect Ogden Codman, was first published in 1897. In the book, the authors denounce Victorian-style interior decoration and interior design, especially rooms decorated with heavy window curtains, Victorian bric-a-brac and overstuffed furniture. They argue that such rooms emphasize upholstery at the expense of proper space planning and architectural design and are, therefore, uncomfortable and rarely used. Wharton and Codman advocated the creation of houses with rooms decorated with strong architectural wall and ceiling treatments, accentuated by well-suited furniture, rooms based on simple, classical design principles such as symmetry and proportion and a sense of architectural balance. The Decoration of Houses is considered a seminal work and its success led to the emergence of professional decorators working in the manner advocated by its authors, most notably Elsie de Wolfe. The book was reprinted by The Mount and Rizzoli and in a hardcover facsimile in 2007.
The Villa Majorelle is a house located at 1 rue Louis-Majorielle in the city of Nancy, France, which was the home and studio of the furniture designer Louis Majorelle. It was designed and built by the architect Henri Sauvage in 1901-1902. The villa is one of the first and most influential examples of the Art Nouveau architectural style in France. It served as a showcase for Majorelle's furniture and the work of other noted decorative artists of the period, including ceramist Alexandre Bigot and stained glass artist Jacques Gruber. It is now owned by the city of Nancy, and is open to the public certain days for tours by reservation.
A. H. Davenport and Company was a late 19th-century, early 20th-century American furniture manufacturer, cabinetmaker, and interior decoration firm. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it sold luxury items at its showrooms in Boston and New York City, and produced furniture and interiors for many notable buildings, including The White House. The word "davenport," meaning a boxy sofa or sleeper-sofa, comes from the company.
Louis Süe was a French painter, architect, designer and decorator. He and André Mare co-founded the Compagnie des arts français, which produced Art Deco furniture and interior decorations for wealthy customers. He also designed buildings and interiors, including the interiors of two passenger liners.
The Art dans Tout movement was a French art group which operated from 1896 to 1901. Originally called Les Cinq, because it had five founder members, artist and lace designer Félix Aubert, sculptor and craftsman Alexandre Charpentier, sculptor and medalist Jean Dampt, sculptor and medalist Henry Nocq and architect Charles Plumet, it later changed its name to Les Six when Nocq left the group in 1897, replaced by painter Étienne Moreau-Nélaton and architect and decorator Tony Selmersheim. In 1898, the group expanded further to become Art dans Tout when Carl-Albert Angst, a sculptor and student of Dampt, Jules Desbois, a sculptor, Paul Follot, a furniture designer, Alphonse Hérold, a cabinetmaker, Antoine Jorrand, a painter and tapestry designer, Henri Sauvage, an architect, and Louis Sorrel, an architect and collaborator of Aubert's, joined. The group dissolved in 1901 due to commercial necessity.
Ernest Boiceau, born in French-speaking Lausanne, was a Swiss designer and decorator of the interwar period.