How to restyle your home: a 1930s style guide (2024)

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How to restyle your home: a 1930s style guide? ›

Period Furniture:

Modernising for comfort and efficiency

It could also involve rethinking the layout – perhaps by opening up smaller rooms to create an open-plan living space or adding an en-suite to a master bedroom. Each decision should enhance how you live in the space while paying respect to the original character of your home.

In homes, a 1930s interior is characterised by striking colour combinations; usually golds, oranges and blue shades and, of course, monochrome. Bold geometrics appeared in tiling, parquet flooring, door panels, lighting and metalwork.

1930s: Colonial Revival

Colonial Revival homes are easily recognizable. Their combination of pitched gable roofs, half-timbered exteriors, brick and stucco, decorative chimneys and often asymmetrical design make them stand out on any street.

Art Deco and Streamline Moderne were the two most popular furniture styles in the 1930s. Art Deco, which first appeared in France, celebrated the modern world through architecture, art, and even home furnishings. Streamline Moderne echoed industrial products and represented the machine age.

Parquet flooring is a sought after classic of the 1930s and modern versions could include chevron or herringbone patterns to keep up the look and feel of the era. Wooden wall panelling was used frequently and while it provides a stately feel to the house, it also tends to render the interior quite dark.

And perhaps as a reaction directly opposed to those dark times, popular colors of the era were light, soft hues … seafoam green, muted gold, pale blue and lavender helped mark the 1930s.

Having emerged in the 1920s, Art Deco was the most popular furniture style of the early 1930s. Art Deco first appeared on the scene in France in 1925 and quickly spread to the rest of the world. It became popular because of how it revolutionized furniture making, architecture, and art.

Traditionally, and often seen in country houses and larger suburban houses up until the 1930s in Britain, the box room was for the storage of boxes, trunks, portmanteaux, and the like, rather than for bedroom use.

Homes built before 1929 all tend to have solid walls, as cavity walls had not been invented. Homes built between 1930 and 1939 may or may not have solid walls. This is when cavity walls were becoming more popular but not yet "the norm". Very few homes were built 1939 to 1945 due to the second world war.

Are 1930s houses Art Deco? ›

The Art Deco movement originated in Paris in the mid-1920s and became one of the first global art styles, expanding throughout Europe and the United States through the 1930s.

Try hanging a vintage mirror above it so the eye is drawn up and away from it, and make sure your colour scheme complements the typically pastel ceramic tile design. If you want to keep a hint of 1930s but don't have any original details, you could evoke the era in your colour choices.

1930 Fashion Overview

1930s clothing brings to mind bias cut evening gowns in liquid satins and silks, tweed suits, flounces and frills and topped off by a cute beret or tilt hat. 30s Fashion certainly seemed fussier than the 1920s with its relentless ornaments of bows, trims and frills.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Art Deco gradually became more subdued. A sleeker form of the style, called Streamline Moderne, appeared in the 1930s, featuring curving forms and smooth, polished surfaces.

Art Deco is a modernist architectural style that flourished in the mid-1920s through to the early-1930s. The era's main architectural characteristics are typically identified by its sleek, linear, often rectangular geometric forms, broken up by curved ornamental elements with opulent details.

Modern architecture is the architectural style that dominated the Western world between the 1930s and the 1960s and was characterized by an analytical and functional approach to building design. Buildings in the style are often defined by flat roofs, open floor plans, curtain windows, and minimal ornamentation.

Though if I read period in a property listing, my first assumption would be Victorian or Edwardian. But I do think 30s counts. At a glance, 1930s semis can be indistinguishable from 1950s because in the post war period a lot of suburban housing was needed, quickly, so they used 1930s designs.