The exhibition at Jacques Lacoste ran from November 2025 to January 2026, fifty pieces by Louis Süe and André Mare, founders of the Compagnie des Arts Français and pioneers of what became known as the 1925 style. The centenary year of the Paris exhibition that named it.

In the years following the war, Paris was changing rapidly. Electricity, motorcars and the telephone became widely available. Coco Chanel would reinvent how women dressed. A generation that had endured the war looked forward with optimism, eager for progress, and wanted their interiors to reflect that confidence in what was coming.

Süe and Mare saw what many of their modernist contemporaries did not: people wanted progress, but they also wanted beauty, continuity, and the comfort of fine craftsmanship. In their 1921 manifesto, Architectures, they wrote: “We would like any beautiful piece of furniture from the past to feel at home among our furniture, to be welcomed as an ancestor, not as an intruder.” More than a century later, the line has turned back on itself.

What set them apart was how they thought about a room. Süe and Mare were among the first designers to bring furniture, lighting and textiles together as a single composition. At a time when the bathroom was purely functional, they treated it as a showpiece.

The chevrons, the fluting, the geometric inlays, the exotic woods and lacquer, these are what we now recognise as Art Deco. Süe and Mare were among the designers who made them coherent. Who understood French classical tradition well enough to move it forward.

Their clients were the figures who defined the era, diplomats, socialites, couturiers like Patou. But some of their most revealing work was conceptual. The Boudoir d'une Actrice, published in the early 1920s through the Compagnie des Arts Français, wasn't designed for a specific patron. It was a proposition, a staged environment built around the idea of the actress, mirrors and lighting and curated objects arranged for the performance of a self. The logic isn't so far from a luxury bathroom or a boutique hotel suite today.

Their reach went well beyond private commissions. In 1921 they designed the luxury cabins on the ocean liner Paris, and in 1927 the first-class lounge on the Île-de-France, the first major liner decorated entirely in Art Deco style. When she arrived in New York on her maiden voyage, thousands of people crowded the docks to see her.

Süe and Mare were responding to the changed world around them, not simply making beautiful objects, but reflecting a new way of living. Design always does. Open-plan living has defined the last thirty years, suited to an informal, sociable way of life. Today, broken-plan layouts are replacing it, a direct response to the pandemic and the rise of working from home.

Walking through the gallery, our eyes kept returning to the Patou desk, its shape made for a man who dressed the women of Paris. A hundred years old and not dated by a day.

Art Deco never truly disappeared. Perhaps because what it represents, beauty as a response to difficulty, confidence in what comes next, is never really out of season. It sits as easily in a room being designed today as it did in 1925.

What Süe and Mare understood, and what that desk shows, is that you don’t have to choose between the past and the present. The best rooms never did.