dolls house source information Art Deco furniture

Art Deco Furniture

Art Deco furniture had strong French overtones and the best highest quality furniture was produced in France. The roots of French Art Deco furniture lay in the French Ancien regime and the work of eighteenth century cabinet makers.

The Art Nouveau era had seen furniture designers stray away from more Conservative tastes and now Art Deco provided a means to return to simple form and refined design. Beauty lay in simplicitiy of form, shape and decoration.

Popular materials included:-

Ebony – rare, expensive and Art Deco furniture makers favourite wood
Exotic woods – palmwood, jacaranda, zebrawood and calamander
Veneers including mahogany, maple, ash and amaranth
Lacquer – towards the end of the period synthetic varnishes were being used in place of hand made lacquer effects
Ivory
Iron
Shagreen (skin of a small fish)
Snakeskin, ponyskin and leathers

Design

Art Deco furniture design can be categorised in three groups.

Traditionalist

Based on France's cabinet making history stemming back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Forms are elegant, simple and light.

Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann was a highly productive traditionalist. Working with ivory, tortoiseshell, horn, leather, silk tassels, ebony amaranth and palisander.

Individualist

In this group are designers whose work is very distinctive and whose individualism prevents them being grouped with anyone else. Lacquer worker Eileen Gray falls into this category. Other Individulists include:-

Jean Dunand
Pierre Legrain
Marcel Coard
Eugene Printz

Modernists

The Modernists rebelled against Neoclassical style which they felt to be confining and tight. Instead they brought machine made furniture to the fore. Metal was a common material. Pieces were constructed from chrome tubes and could be mass produced without any high costs involved. There was little attempt to hide the function of each piece of furniture and bars, filing cabinets, cupboards, hearth fenders and desks were all produced made of wood and metal and left undisguised in their finished form.

The iron pieces were cast in sheets, treated with patina and bolted together. Wood was warm and highly polished to offset the cold metal. Typical woods included palisander, amourette, walnut, sycamore, and violetwood. Upholstery was pigskin,velour or even sable fur!

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