Art Deco Quotes

The city was alive to a nonsensical degree. Every color was so absurdly saturated that I thought it was all kind of like a dream, more a painting or an art deco interpretation of a city than an actual city.

I hate you," Watson said to me, empathetically. "What is it with you and closets?" "They're often quite clean. And if they aren't one can usually find cleaning supplies in them." "Holmes-" "Actually, I booked us a room in an Art Deco hotel," I said, and moments later our car pulled into its circle drive. I'd always prided myself on my timing.

Pen realized it: Sometimes there is nothing to do but surrender yourself to wonder... You must stop measuring - over and over - the line between loving and being in love. You must offer yourself, whole, to the cobalt starfish (and the orange one and the pale pink one and the biscuit-colored one with the raised, chocolate-brown art deco design) and to the clear, clear water and to the sweep of shining sky and to the silver scattershot of leaping fish (an entire school skipping across the ocean like a stone.)

Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Grandfather is the ace numismatist.

at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement,

As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.

Once I'm through the doors, I often pause to take in the grandeur of the lobby. It never tarnishes. It never grows drab or dusty. It never dulls or fades. It is blessedly the same each and every day. There's the reception and concierge to the left, with its midnight-obsidian counter and smart-looking receptionists in black and white, like penguins. And there's the ample lobby itself, laid out in a horseshoe, with its fine Italian marble floors that radiate pristine white, drawing the eye up, up to the second-floor terrace. There are the ornate Art Deco features of the terrace and the grand marble staircase that brings you there, balustrades glowing and opulent, serpents twisting up to golden knobs held static in brass jaws. Guests will often stand at the rails, hands resting on a glowing post, as they survey the glorious scene below—porters marching crisscross, dragging suitcases behind them, guests lounging in sumptuous armchairs or couples tucked into emerald love seats, their secrets absorbed into the deep, plush velvet.

She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.

I think I might have something for you today," he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked.

And on the edge of the black sky, where the dawn’s light had just squeezed through, a fleet of bombers, like bats, sailed through a bed of pale clouds and dove toward the Huangpu River, the art deco buildings, the Customs House, and the high-rises on the waterfront. American B-29s.

I don’t need to speed-read Architecture for Dummies and pretend I can tell Gothic and art deco apart?” He turns to me, stone-faced. “You’re joking.” “Please look ahead.” “You can, right? You are able to tell apart—” “Husband, darling, deep inside you know the answer to that, and please look at the road when you’re landing a plane.

There was a little optometrist shop on south Broadway tucked in between a pizza joint and what amounted to a head shop where you could buy glow-in-the-dark posters, bongs, and whatever else the hippies began marketing after they went commercial in the '70s... I had never visited the optometrist shop. The entrance had a 1930s look that I liked—art deco molded-tin awning over the doorway, and Bakelite tiles on the foyer walls. It looked like the kind of business that would be owned by an elderly optometrist who had serviced families for generations and personally ground lenses in his back room. I liked the look of the shop, but I drove right past it on my way to Sight City!!! where you could buy Two Pair for the Price of One!!! according to the billboards plastered all over Denver blocking every decent view of the Rocky Mountains.

I just think it's fortunate that Sir Isaac Newton didn't share the sense of humor of a member of the public, because had he done so, he would of been so amused by the simple effects of gravity, that he would of never gotten round making a comprehensive study of it's causes. That's the punchline! 'a comprehensive study of it's courses'! I worked for that! Will you be telling this joke at work? I don't think so! And yes, I am aware that I say this to you while hanging precariously of this art-deco balcony. And I do so deliberately in the hope that I will fall to my death, and that you will learn about the thin line between slap-stick and tragedy.

And then the darkness gives way to white neon. An Art Deco font, burning into the night, announces our arrival at the CINEMA LE CHAMPO. The letters dwarf me. Cinema. Has there ever been a more beautiful word? My heart soars as we pass the colorful film posters and walk through the gleaming glass doors. The lobby is smaller than what I’m used to, and though it’s missing the tang of artificially buttered popcorn, there’s something in the air I recognize, something both musty and comforting.

Hillary Clinton, who’d known about the book since I described it to her during my time working for her at the State Department, had agreed early and with enthusiasm. “Thank you, my friend, for your message; it is great hearing from you and I am delighted to know that you are close to completing your book project,” she wrote that July. The letter was printed on embossed stationery in a curly art deco font, like a New Yorker headline or a piece of set-dressing from BioShock. It was very lovely, and not the sort of thing that wins Wisconsin.

Musk burst in carrying a sink and laughing. It was one of those visual puns that amuses him. “Let that sink in!” he exclaimed. “Let’s party on!” Agrawal and Segal smiled. Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter’s headquarters, which was in a ten-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor café, with a patio overlooking San Francisco’s City Hall, served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. In the second-floor conference facilities, which Musk commandeered as his base camp, there were long wooden tables filled with earthy snacks and five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water,” Musk said when offered one. It was an ominous opening scene. One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks.

We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.

To do a grid search afterward and make sure nothing that could be flipped had not been flipped. Unless there had been more than one somebody. But even then. “Seems like an awful lot of effort,” Wyatt said. “For a bunch of kids. When I was kid, Officer, and maybe your experience was the same, effort was the least of all possible temptations.” “I’ll tell you what I think.” The cop turned back to them. “Get you a security system. Or a big old dog.” “Ms. Kilkenny told you about the other incidents?” Wyatt said. “Yes, of course I told him,” Candace said. “And stop calling me that.” “She did,” the cop said. “About the birds and such.” He kept a straight face, but the way people do when they want to make clear they’re keeping a straight face. Wyatt could feel Candace vibrating next to him at a frequency that was about to blow out the glass in the Art Deco skylight above them. Wyatt didn’t think the cop was dumb. The cop, like everyone, was just keeping a finger on the pulse of his own self-interest.

Perhaps the most avid user of Amazon’s auction site was Bezos himself, who began to collect various scientific and historical curiosities. Most memorably, he purchased the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone, for $40,000. After the company’s headquarters moved yet again over the summer, out of the deteriorating Columbia Building and into the Pacific Medical Center building, a 1930s-era art-deco hospital that sat on a hill overlooking the I-5 freeway, Bezos displayed the skeleton in the lobby. Next to it was a sign that read PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

Early in a career that began in 1912 when he was 19 years old, Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artists who called himself Erté after the french pronunciation of his initials, was regarded as a 'miraculous magician,' whose spectacular fashions transformed the ordinary into the outstanding, whose period costumes made the present vanish mystically into the past, and whose décors converted bare stages into sparkling wonderlands of fun and fancy. When his career ended with his death in 1990, Erté was considered as 'one of the twentieth-century's single most important influences on fashion,' 'a mirror of fashion for 75 years,' and the unchallenged 'prince of the music hall,' who had been accorded the most significant international honors in the field of design and whose work was represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. It is not surprising that Erté's imaginative designs for fashion, theater, opera, ballet, music hall, film and commerce achieved such renown, for they are as crisp and innovative in their color and design as they are elegant and extravagant in character, and redolent of the romance of the pre- and post-Great War era, the period when Erté's hand became mature, fully developed and representative of its time. Art historians and scholars define Ertés unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gab between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution.

While [Frank H.] Young added, 'In a good modern layout the principles of all good layout still prevail . . . cohesion, legibility, movement, emphasis, simplicity, and continuity.

However, [Edmund G. Gress] wrote, " we must not simplify to such an extent that life and movement are gone. That is where those persons go wrong who claim that type was made to read, and nothing else matters but the setting up of a paragraph in a legible type so that it can be easily read. We do not read everything that appears in print, but do read that which appears interesting.

Alerted by the door’s subtle chime, Dr. Ricard emerged from an interior room. She had shoulder-length silver hair that didn’t match her youthful face. Square black glasses, minimal makeup, black knit pants with a deep-cut black-and-white silk top—Ricard was an odd mixture of hippie and hip. She couldn’t be more than forty, but Taylor wasn’t very good with ages. Ricard crossed the room and held out her hand. Taylor shook it, then followed when the doctor gestured, leading the way into her inner sanctum. The room was filled with sunlight—facing east, the early morning sun spilled through the windows, lending an air of good cheer to the surroundings. Two heavy couches faced one another across a second art deco glass coffee table; a large wing chair covered in black velvet bore the markings of frequent use. Sure enough, Ricard crossed the room, curled like a cat with her feet tucked under her, laid the notepad and pen on the coffee table and indicated Taylor should sit with a nod of her head. Taylor did, amazed at the control the woman exuded without even speaking. After a moment, the doctor spoke, her accented voice making Taylor feel like she was on a museum tour in Great Britain.

In 1925, a master plan was instituted to blend the French neo-classical design with the tropical background. The Art Deco movement, both in Havana and in Miami Beach, took hold during the late 1920’s, and is found primarily in the residential section of Miramar. Miramar is where most of the embassies are located, including the massive Russian embassy. The predominant street is Fifth Avenue known as La Quinta Avenida, along which is found the church of Jesus de Miramar, the Teatro Miramar and the Karl Marx Theater. There is also the Old Miramar Yacht Club and the El Ajibe Restaurant, recently visited and televised by Anthony Bourdain on his show, “No Reservations.” Anthony Bourdain originally on the Travel Channel is now being shown on CNN. The modern five-star Meliá Habana hotel, known for its cigar bar, is located opposite the Miramar Trade Centre. Started in 1772, el Paseo del Prado, also known as el Paseo de Marti, became the picturesque main street of Havana. It was the first street in the city to be paved and runs north and south, dividing Centro Habana from Old Havana. Having been designed by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, a French landscape architect, it connects the Malecón, the city’s coastal esplanade, with a centrally located park, Parque Central. Although the streets on either side are still in disrepair, the grand pedestrian walkway goes for ten nicely maintained blocks. The promenade has a decorated, inlaid, marble terrazzo pavement with a balustrade of small posts. It is shaded by a tree-lined corridor and has white marble benches for the weary tourist. Arguably, the Malecón is the most photographed street in Havana. It lies as a bulwark just across the horizon from the United States, which is only 90, sometimes treacherous miles away. It is approximately 5 miles long, following the northern coast of the city from east to west. This broad boulevard is ideal for the revelers partaking in parades and is the street used for Fiesta Mardi Gras, known in Cuba as Los Carnavales. It has at times also been used for “spontaneous demonstrations” against the United States. It runs from the entrance to Havana harbor, alongside the Centro Habana neighborhood to the Vedado neighborhood, past the United States Embassy on the Calle Calzada.

Shanghai, my home, my city, was no longer mine after a plague of wars; it belonged to the foreigners from many countries. The British, having defeated us a century ago, controlled the rich and prosperous Settlement with the Americans, and the French built their villas in the Concession. The Japanese, armed with terrifying fighter planes and rifles, were the newly minted victors. They had established their own domain for many years in the Hongkou district, north of the Huangpu River, where they played baseball in the park and staffed hospitals with their women and soldiers from Japan, and now they marched on our streets and slept in the homes they’d seized. We Shanghainese, the conquered, were powerless. Many lost their homes in the Old City, south of the Settlement; only a few lucky ones, like my family, got to keep their ancestral homes, and many others crowded under the shadows of the art deco buildings or scattered around the rice paddies and mosquito-infested fields in the north and west. Segregation

There were just so many cafés now—bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse—with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment desperately trying to evoke Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, or New York. Even the ashtrays bore edgy designer patterns evocative of Art Deco and the Belle Époque. And yet it has to be said that these new cafés of Bucharest lack the enfolding and layered elegance—and especially the intimacy—of cafés in Central Europe. I was still south of the Carpathians, in the former Byzantine and Turkish world. There was simply

The retirees are gone from their plastic rockers on the front porches of the aging art-deco hotels. Hookers, dealers, pimps, chicken hawks, and runaways no longer stroll Ocean Drive, hustling their wares. The Yuppies have staked claims to South Beach, spiffing up the old buildings with turquoise and salmon paint, dressing themselves in bright, baggy cottons and silks, and hovering on the perimeter of perpetual trendiness.

Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the Voyager spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off. Unlike

The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead.

When Europe killed feral and stray cats, the bubonic plague came and wiped away lives. Generations of families ended with the plague. Some say coincidence. Some say divine retribution. Some say killing cats upset the world’s ecological balance. When humans interject themselves in the natural food chain that exists between animals, disaster consumes the earth. Cats have always lived heroically among humans and other animals. We look like we belong in ancient temples and art deco theaters. We go with any architecture,

Designed in a 'Pueblo Deco' style, which blends Mission with Art Deco influences, the DCA tower is a composite modeled after real Hollywood landmarks built in the 1920's; possible influences include the Hollywood Tower at 6200 Franklin Avenue, The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard and the Chateau Marmont at 8221 Sunset Boulevard.

Although he was considered to be a dictatorial boss by his enemies, Mayor Hague was thought of as a hero and benefactor by most of his constituents. Serving as the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey 30 years, from 1917 to 1947, he was adored by his constituents and feared by his enemies. Known as the boss he served as the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey from 1917 to 1947. If anyone in the city had a problem, they could go to one of his Ward Heelers to get help. Hospitalization at the Medical Center, the art deco hospital complex, built on the center slope of the city, was free to any Jersey City resident, lacking the money for the care they received. My sister was treated there prior to her death, and my brother was born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. By the same token, contractors judiciously selected to do work for the city, knew that they would have to give the mayor a hefty kick back. That’s just the way it was.… ‘Nuf said!

I examined the art deco earrings, pearl drops dangling from a rose gold setting. The hair receiver was pretty, too, though I couldn’t imagine what it was for or what Jannalynn would do with it. Did anyone need to receive hair anymore? “She’ll wear the earrings to show them off,” I said. “It’s harder to brag about getting a hair receiver.” Brenda gave me a veiled look, and I understood from her thoughts that this opinion branded me as a philistine.

Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo’s Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks.

The famous art deco architecture, fine dining, spas, and legendary nightlife make for an unforgettable vacation day in Miami Beach.

Miami Beach, from North Beach to South Beach, is filled with iconic Art Deco architecture, first-class hotels, and amazing dining

Charles sold these and several other items before moving onto the next lot. "Next up is a figurine of a rhino in amber-coloured glass, maker unknown but definitely of the art deco period. Where is it? Oh it's up here. I'll pass it down to you Angela, my dear. That's right, let me give you the horn." Laughter ran through the crowd but Charles didn't understand why. He did his best to carry on but the mood of the audience had turned playful. "Lot forty-seven is a beautiful pair of French, silver and cut-glass claret jugs." Angela held them up carefully. "These really are exquisite and well worth a good look," Charles continued, "Now, can everyone see Angela's jugs?" The crowd laughed out loud again. Angela stood there, feeling her face turning red with embarrassment.

The building itself—classical exterior, art deco interior—stands in contrast to the brutalist architecture of the FBI building, and the contrast captures something of the reality. The J. Edgar Hoover Building represents the instrumental aspects of justice, the Robert F. Kennedy building represents the ideal.

I can’t come up there,” I whispered. “I can’t do it. I can’t wake up in the morning and go back to being nothing.” The thunderous roar of waves amplified the silence. I figured he had dropped the matter, and I let my vision blur in the glimmering crystals of his art deco chandelier above. Then he spoke. “I can’t wake up tomorrow and not smell you in my sheets, Snitch.

I noticed a lot of magic realism- Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez and Alice Hoffman. I tugged down Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, a small book with an art deco cover, and a wave of warmth spread through me- it was one of my favorites, magic realism centered on food and sex. Leafing through the pages, I revisited the pleasure of the reading, feeling myself on a foggy winter day in San Francisco drinking hot chocolate.

It was art deco that made these buildings unique and that caught the eye of Hollywood, which saw something romantically American in the optimism and innovation of a style that blends cubism, futurism, modernism and, most of all, a sense of movement.

In art deco, we see the link between the lavish design aesthetic of the 19th century and the stripped-down efficiency of the 20th. Unlike a skyscraper, a deco hotel is modern yet accessible, even friendly, with its frescoed walls and shady window eyebrows.

Instantly, who knows from where, angels small in stature, followed by swifts, flitted out and started tracing patterns above Brother Mocius while chiming in. Eagles, their white beards loosed to the wind, stooped, screeching. Swarms of fierce bees streaked by, obedient and humming; diverse butterflies swishes, vipers crawled from their dens, whistling, and hyenas leapt out, sobbing and weeping. Howl, peep, roar, flutter. Everything was keening. Even the humble gentian and saxifrage, customarily dumb, as is meet for plants, contributed a barely audible squeak, not to mention the slender lizards, darting in with their hatchlings

The letter was printed on embossed stationery in a curly art deco font, like a New Yorker headline or a piece of set-dressing from BioShock. It was very lovely, and not the sort of thing that wins Wisconsin.

managed to walk a surprisingly successful line between formal Victorian and sleek, modern art deco.

He parked in a side street behind the historic Labia theatre with its neon pink hearts and fairy lights blinking in the art-deco windows.

TOPOPHOBIA The Fear of Situations – Stagefright The average man has a pretty good opinion of himself. Lost in the anonymity of the crowd, protected by the mask he habitually wears against the scrutiny of the outside world, he performs his duties, does his work, fulfills his social obligations, and rests secure in his belief that he is equal to the ordinary emergencies of ordinary life. But take him away from this familiar environment, cut him off from the protective influence of his fellows, set him apart from the crowd, and however agreeable and flattering he may find his momentary distinction, he will miss the familiar devices that adorned his everyday life, the little tricks by which he “got by.” Set on a stage, he is viewed, as it were, naked, and in every gesture he reveals his incompetence. His erstwhile friends gaze at him across an empty space; their expectant air strips him of every studied platitude and leaves him stammering like an idiot. These people, whom he knows so well, are transformed into master-intellects, superior beings to whom he is as the anthropoid ape. Their merciless eyes penetrate to his soul, he feels their scorn as a whip on his back. His naked limbs knock together in terror, his teeth chatter, he feels icy hands clutching at his throat. The fond hopes that lured him to this traitorous pre-eminence desert him, and he babbles incoherencies in place of the golden words that were to win him applause. Back in the days when he was a child and the world was compassed by the walls of his house, he strutted before proud parents, gratifying his need for a stage on which to exhibit himself. Now his old love for personal display brings with it a concentrated fear that is the social punishment for his vanity.

Bacardi Limited was started in Santiago de Cuba by Facundo Bacardí Massó, a wine merchant. Having immigrated to Cuba from Spain in 1830, he refined the method of making a quality rum, which until then was considered an inferior drink compared to grain whiskey. Filtering the rum through charcoal gave it a smoother taste and made it the drink of choice in the island nation. One hundred years later, the company headquarters moved into an art deco building in Havana. Other than drinking it straight, the favorite way of drinking rum was with Coca-Cola, which is now called a “Cuba Libre.” At the time I was there, the midshipmen bought cases of rum for very little money and brought them back to the ship without anyone objecting. The Navy also routinely flew to Cuba, and brought airplane loads of Bacardi Rum back to Pensacola, on what were called “Rum Runs.” This was not considered smuggling, but rather was thought of as “routine multi-engine training flights for U.S. Navy SNB-5 pilots.

First in line was the Hanukkah table, all a-glitter with blue and silver tinsel and featuring a huge antique Art Deco menorah in sterling silver. There were platters of smoked salmon, trays of rugelach, babkas, and sufganiyot, and on small nearby steam tables, dishes of brisket and of latkes. The main table also held a large collection of side dishes or trimmings - cream cheese, applesauce, onions, pickles, horseradish, tomatoes, capers, and such - and was strewn with Hanukkah gelt and chocolate-marshmallow dreidels on pretzel sticks.

However, during the inter-war period the term ‘Art Deco’ was not used, but the words ‘modern’ or the French ‘moderne’ were used instead. The term ‘Art Deco’ was first used by the design critic Bevis Hillier in 1968, in his book Art Deco of the Twenties and Thirties. This was followed by a groundbreaking exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the United States in 1971 called ‘The World of Art Deco’.

Just as New York’s Armory Show synthesized modern art in 1913, the Paris show on decorative arts in 1925 synthesized another kind of modernity and influenced commercial and decorative art, popularizing it to the point where industrial designers became household names. Art Deco, like many movements in the design field, began as a movement in furniture and decorative arts, but its influence in one form or another extended beyond interiors and magazine covers and the figures of Erté, to the design of automobiles and even locomotives.

Academic terms did not concern them. American architects never called their style Art Deco at the time,

Alchemy is the name of this temple of images. Here a towering wall of video flashes glamorous vamps and alien androgynes over the heads of the crowd; the black cupid’s bow of Louise Brooks’ lips, the arch of David Bowie’s eyebrow, the Art Deco planes of Fritz Lang’s subversive female android. The demigods of the modern world, as glimpsed through shattered glass. She comes because she wants to believe in magic. Not the bunny-out-of-a-hat kind; the Alistair Crowley kind. This is a ritual.

Then you thought you were pregnant and it scared me so much I got a fucking vasectomy. And it didn’t even occur to me to ask Sarah what she thought. I just made the appointment, and a few days after, I was walking past this antique store and I saw this ring. An old, yellow-gold art deco thing with a pearl. I saw it and thought, That would be a perfect engagement ring. Maybe I should buy it. And my very next thought after that was, What the fuck am I doing? Not just the ring––which Sarah would’ve hated, by the way––but the vasectomy, all of it. I was doing it all for you, and I know that’s not normal, and it definitely wasn’t fair to her, so I ended things. That day.” He shakes his head. “I scared myself so much that I couldn’t tell you what had happened. It was terrifying to realize how much I loved you. And then you and Trey broke up, and––God, Poppy, of course all of it was because of you. Everything is because of you. Everything.

He had taste, though, and instead of decking the pub out the usual olde worlde accouterments he’d gone with a rather classy Art Deco styling with blond walnut dining tables with matching chairs and circular Perspex light fittings hanging from the ceiling. The mahogany bar had rounded corners and brass detailing and there were framed vintage travel posters on the walls advertising impossibly sun-kissed destinations—Llandudno, Bridlington and Bexhill-on-Sea. All it needed was a murdered heiress and Hercule Poirot would have felt right at home.