Art Deco Entryway Ideas

Stand just inside your own front door and turn around. In the first second you see two things, the door you came through and whatever stands across from it, and in a deco hall the two have to speak the same language. People hunting for art deco entryway ideas mostly look up a table or a door, rarely the hallway as a whole. You can almost never replace the door. So the furniture opposite it does the period work, which is why I start any plan for art deco entryway furniture by staring at the door first.

The door you cannot replace is still the brief

Read it like a drawing. Tall stiles and narrow panels are vertical lines, and vertical lines want a fluted or reeded front on the table below. A door with stepped panels or a stepped glass light is asking for a stepped top, the setback skyline of the period shrunk to furniture. A fanlight or sunburst wants a curve, a waved apron or a rounded end. The consoles in the shop band below are named for exactly these moves, reeded, crenellated, waves, double diamond, and that is the easiest way to sort entryway tables for this hall: by which line the door already drew.

Fluting, stepping or a fan, and only one of them

Deco at its best is one idea repeated with discipline. Put a reeded front under a sunburst mirror beside a stepped lamp and the hall reads as a costume shop. Pick the door's motif, give it to the table, and let everything else stay plain: a plain frame, a plain shade, a plain runner. Count motifs as you scroll the Dark Luxury Lookbook and the deco rooms that hold up turn out almost boring. Usually there is one.

Art deco entryway inspiration comes from the lobby, not the living room

Look at where the style grew up. Deco was a building style before it was a furniture style, and many of its most famous interiors are lobbies. The Chrysler Building, finished in 1930, is remembered as much for the room you walk into as for the spire. A foyer is a lobby at domestic scale: hard floor, one big gesture on the wall, light from the side. Most art deco interior design ideas are written for the sofa and the rug instead.

A long cabinet in a short hall

The look on this page puts a long credenza, a little over six and a half feet of it, against a pale wall. It works because that foyer is wide enough to stand back from. In a typical hall the mistake is depth, not length. A cabinet built for a dining room usually runs about eighteen inches deep, and the hall pays for all of it in walking room. If the hall is narrow, keep the length and give up the depth: a console in the low teens of inches still delivers the long horizontal that deco loves. Save the credenza cabinets for the foyer that can take a step back.

Gold that waits for the lamp

The canvases in this look are gold abstracts hung as a set of three, and gold paint is a strange surface in daylight. At noon it reads flat, nearly beige against a cream wall. Once the sun has gone and a single lamp or sconce is lit low and off to one side, it starts to move, and a reeded console front would catch the same raking light as a row of fine shadows. Most art deco entryway pictures are shot in full daylight, which is exactly when gold looks its worst. Hang gold wall decor where a lamp can reach it at an angle, never straight on, or it simply glares.

Art deco entryway photos are cropped above the coat hooks

Nobody photographs the keys. Every frame stops short of the coats, shoes, mail and the bag dropped on arrival, and a real entry has to absorb all of it. Deco is unforgiving here because its surfaces are glossy and symmetrical, and one stray envelope breaks the line. Give the clutter somewhere to go first: drawers, a closed cabinet, a bench with a lid. Plenty of luxury entryway furniture is built for exactly this, and the drawer pulls are where a little brass belongs anyway.

One heavy thing and a lot of air

Which brings me to the onyx. The sphere in that frame is a single dense thing, cool and veined, sitting in a field of pale wall and warm gold. Scroll back through any art deco entryway gallery and the halls worth copying each give one heavy object that much air. Choose yours, set it off center, and stop. The door has already said most of what needs saying.