When Athena Calderone walked into her TriBeCa apartment – once owned by Thierry Despont – for the first time, “there was something about it that screamed art deco,” she says. She was familiar with the movement’s design principles: geometric, almost Egyptian-inspired shapes; rich materials and colours; repeated forms. Yet she wanted to know more. So, on a trip to Paris, she immersed herself in the buildings and rooms that defined the period: the galleries at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Galeries Lafayette, and Auguste Perret’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, to name just a few.
And when she returned to New York – and her apartment – Calderone decided to explore a modern interpretation of the early 20th-century style. “There’s a restraint that was happening in art deco – there was a sumptuous quality to the material, but it also had this quiet restraint,” she says. “So I would say throughout the entire apartment, I’ll be kind of playing with that level of restraint and elegant materiality.”
It starts with her floors. This month, she released a “Salon” collection with Beni Rugs that takes baseline cues from art deco, as well as the Vienna Secession movement. (Josef Hoffmann, an architect who worked in both styles, was a noted influence.) Throughout the design process, she toyed with the more muted jewel tones of silver, ice blue, and oxblood, as well as repetitive geometric forms, and eventually photographed it all at Perret’s former penthouse in the 16th arrondissement.