The Most Stunning Art Deco Design London Has Ever Seen!

Few Art Deco buildings were more glamorous.

Of course, Claridges, The Savoy and the brand new Dorchester all had sumptuous Art Deco interiors. But Oliver P. Bernard’s designs for this simply stunning luxury hotel made it one of the most celebrated interiors in London.

A lost art deco gem, the gleaming foyer of a grand London hotel saved from demolition and put in store for more than 30 years, will rise again as the star of an exhibition next year.

In 1969, on the eve of the interior of the Strand Palace hotel being gutted, curators and volunteers from the V&A museum worked through the night to dismantle its foyer.

The foyer was designed in 1930 by Oliver Bernard, who was not an architect but a set designer for theatre and opera. Breathing the glamour of Hollywood and the jazz age, his foyer was described as "a dazzling essay in geometry and light", and was one of the earliest uses in Britain of internally lit glass as an architectural feature.

It instantly made the hotel one of the most fashionable art deco interiors in London. By 1969 the style was completely out of fashion, and the hotel owners were determined to modernise.

Carol Hogben, a now retired V&A curator who led the midnight rescue team, said that without the V&A's intervention the foyer would have been smashed with sledgehammers. Until now the museum has never had the money or space to reconstruct the foyer, but it announced yesterday that the hundreds of pieces of glass, steel and marble would be pieced together to recreate the glowing glamour of the original, including a flight of seven steps and its balustrade, two illuminated glass pillars, and the drum and revolving door. After the exhibition is seen in London and tours for two years, it might become a permanent feature of the museum's 20th century galleries.

The exhibition, the largest ever on the style that swept the planet between the world wars and landed on every suburban tea table in the form of Clarice Cliff and other deco pottery designers, will bring together artefacts borrowed from Europe, America, Asia, and India - including many displayed at the exhibition that gave the style its name, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1926.