Art Deco Coffee Table Ideas

The style takes its name from a Paris exhibition of decorative and industrial arts held in 1925, though the label itself only stuck decades later, as the Wikipedia entry on Art Deco explains. That gap matters when you shop. Half of what is sold under the name is a later idea of the period, all gold and mirror, and the other half is closer to how those rooms were actually furnished: low tables in lacquer, glass and stone, with the drama carried by the sofa and the walls. Start with the art deco coffee tables and sort them by the top before anything else.

Glass, and the blue people keep asking about

Glass is the most searched material in this corner, and a surprising share of it is blue. Cobalt and blue mirrored glass were real period materials, used on dressing tables and occasional tables, and a blue glass top still reads as Deco faster than any amount of gold leaf. It is also the hardest to live with. Glass shows every fingerprint in daylight and turns into a black mirror at night, reflecting the lamp rather than the room. Look at the glass coffee tables if your room is bright and your household is tidy.

Stone that arrives in pieces

In one room here a 52 inch white marble table is really a nest, two tops at different heights set before a blue upholstered sofa and a black faux mohair chair. The stepped outline is a Deco habit, the same instinct as a ziggurat or a fanned shell, and it lets the table shrink when the room needs floor. Across the art deco coffee table gallery on this page, it is the one piece that changes size with the evening, and the Dark Luxury Lookbook shows it among darker rooms.

Art deco coffee table photos where the tops overlap

Nesting stone photographs well and works better, because the lower top slides out for a drink and back in when the guests leave. Look for nests where the two tops are different shapes, a circle over a rectangle or two offset ovals, since identical twins stacked together read as a storage solution rather than a design. The round coffee tables include several that pair this way.

Long, low and dark

Two of the four rooms use a fifty inch dark brown rectangle, one before a camel sofa beside a rope floor lamp, one before a walnut framed sofa with a sepia landscape above. These tables are plain on purpose. In a Deco room the sofa is usually the statement, curved, channeled or in a strong color, and a long dark table lets it be. The art deco sofa ideas show which shapes need that kind of quiet partner.

Art deco coffee table pictures with an oval in matte black

The fourth room is the most graphic: an oval table in matte black between a light grey shearling sofa and a white accent chair. Oval is the shape with the fastest growing searches in this group, and it suits the period, because an ellipse has the streamlined curve of a 1930s ocean liner without any ornament at all. Matte rather than gloss keeps it from looking like a piano. The oval coffee tables are worth a look before the rectangles.

Zinc, concrete and the machine age

Deco loved the machine as much as the jewel box. A round drum in antique zinc or a black concrete round belongs to that industrial side, and either one cools down a room heavy with velvet. Put one in front of a deep sofa and the room stops feeling like a hotel lobby. The metal coffee tables carry more of this mood.

Not the book

Some of the art deco coffee table inspiration people search for is not furniture at all but the large picture book of the period that sits on top of one. Both belong in the room. If you are gathering art deco coffee table ideas, buy the table plain enough that the book, a single bowl and the lamplight can do the decorating. What goes wrong most often is gold, mirror and stepped edges in one piece, a table trying to be the whole decade.