100 Years of Interior Design Trends and the Moments That Transformed Our Homes

Better Homes and Gardens has covered interior design since the dawn of the Jazz Age. We've followed the decorating choices in American homes from the luxe look of Art Deco through the austerity of World War II, the Atomic Age exuberance of the 1950s, and into a new century where tech makes our homes as smart as The Jetsons.

Join us on a decade-by-decade journey through the furniture, colors, and styles that filled our homes over the past century, along with a look at the people and events that drove the designs of our lives.

Credit: Archival Photos: Better Homes & Gardens. Bottom Left: HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES

1920s

The 1920s roared. With World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic over, a sense of optimism and a burst of economic prosperity fueled a desire for glamour and luxury in American homes. Art Deco, a look that featured bold silhouettes, rich colors, geometric patterns, luxurious fabrics, and mirrored and metallic finishes, was the age's reigning look.

The Rise of the Art Deco Aesthetic

"Art Deco is a pastiche of different styles united by a desire to be modern," says Dr. Anna Ruth Gatlin, assistant professor of interior design at Auburn University. "There was an exuberance of having fought this great war and being done with war forever. The future was bright. People didn't want to look to the past; they wanted to look forward in all aspects of their lives."

Looking forward meant buying furnishings that took their inspiration from new technologies of the era: cars, skyscrapers, jazz, movies, and radio. Industrial design heavily influenced furniture design. "You see a streamlined aesthetic that comes from cars and trains expressed in curvy furniture," Gatlin says. The curvy Parisian club chair—which inspired Pottery Barn's monster hit Manhattan club chair four generations later—is peak Art Deco.

Starburst designs were also popular in upholstery, wallpaper, tiles, and light fixtures. "That's directly related to the idea of radio waves and crackling electricity," Gatlin says.

Credit: General Photographic Agency / Getty Images

At the same time, bold geometric patterns inspired by Cubism, the first abstract style of modern art, showed up in rugs and mosaic-tiled floors. Wood floors were laid in angular herringbone, chevron, and parquet patterns, giving them a striking abstract look. Stepped forms inspired by skyscrapers showed up in desks, bookcases, and chairs, while new manufacturing techniques made it possible to incorporate chrome and mirrors into furniture, allowing for dramatic shapes and glamourous finishes.

Colors reflected the era's sense of optimism, with deep reds, yellows, blues, and purples often paired with high-shine silver, chrome, or black accents. Strong color contrasts appeared on Art Deco items, inspired by the plush decor of jazz clubs and Fauvism, an early 20th painting movement that emphasized bright colors.

In 1922, King Tut's tomb was discovered in Egypt, and moving pictures brought the images to America. Lotus flowers, scarabs, and cats showed up as motifs in everything from upholstery to rugs to vases and ashtrays.

Left: Credit: Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Right: Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

Bauhaus Beginnings

But 1920s interior design was not all glitz and curves. Bauhaus—the German school of industrial design that decreed form should follow function—was also born in this era.

Yep, minimalism had its beginnings in the age of The Great Gatsby and several icons of modern design, including the Barcelona Chair and Wassily Chair, were created in the 1920s. Bauhaus designers stripped furniture down to its fundamental elements, with everything from tables to teapots reduced to simple geometric forms.

Meet the Wassily Chair, an Icon of Modern Design Whose History Dates Back to the 1920s

Credit: Left: Courtesy of Knoll. Right: Getty Images.

Bauhaus designers wanted to create beautiful objects that could be mass-produced and therefore available to all, not just the rich. That's why they used steel, glass, plywood, and plastic in their creations. While unconventional materials at the time, they fit with the Bauhaus ethos of practicality.

Ultimately, however, the 1920s were all about the bling. "People craved a luxurious component in their lives, whether it was leather upholstered furniture or a lucite clock," Gatlin says. "The Jazz Age was glamour and glitz."

Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

1930s

And just like that, the nation plunged into the Great Depression. In 1929, the stock market crashed, the banking system collapsed, and the party ended. At the height of the Great Depression, nearly 25% of the total workforce was unemployed. Factories were shut down, farms and homes were lost to foreclosure, and wages and productivity plunged to a third of their 1929 peak. Austerity quickly replaced Art Deco glamour. Most people no longer had money to spend on home furnishings, so minimalism became a necessity, not an aesthetic choice.

Compared to homes in the 1920s, rooms were more open and spacious because people had fewer belongings. There was a cleaner, less cluttered look, with little to no art on the walls. To make up for sparsely furnished rooms, people hung floral and striped wallpaper and laid down hooked floral area rugs to visually fill the space. Colors became more subdued to soothe the somber mood of the era and included soothing neutrals and cheerful pastels.

The 1930s were the golden age of radio, and living rooms were arranged around the family radio cabinet, which was treated like a piece of furniture, much like TVs in the latter part of the 20th century.

Left: Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

Right: Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

While Art Deco influences lingered, mainly because people couldn't afford to replace their old furniture, Gatlin says, new furniture and household items made in this era were in the Art Moderne style—a cleaner, lighter, more streamlined look than its ornate predecessor. "Art Moderne was a celebration of mass-produced and machine-made," Gatlin says.

Jadeite Supplied Cheer During the Great Depression, and Its Joyful Legacy Continues Today

Credit: Quentin Bacon

All that Depression-era austerity didn't kill high design, though. The design company Knoll formed in the late 1930s and Frank Lloyd Wright created his masterwork, Fallingwater, in 1939. European-born designers who would go on to change the look of architecture and interior design in the 20th century —like Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and designer Mies van der Rohe—also came to the U.S. in the 1930s, fleeing the Nazis and a brewing war in Europe. Their arrival set the stage for a revolution in American interior design.

Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

1940s

World War II defined the 1940s. Hitler's forces swept through Europe, Hirohito's through the Pacific, and here at home, our energy, materials, and industrial might went into the fight. "For the first half of the decade, almost nothing happens in the interior design world because of the war," Gatlin says. Factories stopped creating furniture and consumer goods and began making tanks, bullets, and fighter planes to supply our troops. Even the creation of Fiesta dishware came to a halt so its manufacturer could shift resources to produce china for armed forces.

When the war ended in 1945, a new era began. "The soldiers come home and they're ready to buy a house and start a family," Gatlin says. "There's a huge boom in residential building." While factories retooled from war production, a materials shortage meant new houses were built small and at a low cost. Most homes built in the late 1940s had two bedrooms and averaged just under 1,000 square feet.

Levittown, the nation's first suburban planned community, was built in 1947 atop a potato field on Long Island, N.Y. It was the beginning of the post-war housing boom and the tract house, with Levitt & Sons cranking out 12 houses a day for four years. There were more people who wanted houses than there were houses, so builders found a shortcut: Finish one level of the house, leaving the attic or basement unfinished. This kept costs down, got the houses move-in ready faster, and allowed homeowners to finish the houses themselves as their families grew.

Left: Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

Right: Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

Since steel and other metals were in short supply, wood became the material of choice. Knotty pine paneling was added to nearly every room of a house. "It was an inexpensive material that a DIYer could install," Gatlin says. Dark wood furniture finishes were also popular, partly because that's what was left from the pre-WWII era and partly because people wanted to give their homes a cozy feel after the atrocities of the war.

Kitchens take on a recognizably modern shape in the late 1940s, thanks to the Bauhaus focus on efficient work areas and storage. Easy-to-clean linoleum floors, built-in cabinets topped by long, interrupted stretches of countertop, and electric appliances all make an appearance.

Those appliances were almost uniformly white. American factories were still retooling, so there was no capacity for making stoves and refrigerators in a spectrum of colors. And as Americans worried about polio, which swept the nation in the 1940s, white appliances looked sanitary and safe.

How Modernism Blossomed During the 1940s to Become One of the Most Iconic Decorating Styles

Charles and Ray Eames with fiberglass side chairs, a frame from the Eames film Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair, 1960. | Credit: Courtesy of Eames Office, LLC

Ultimately, the 1940s were a transitional period. "The average American was living in a kind of country-style home for much of the decade," Gatlin says. Wartime supply shortages meant the average person was cobbling together interiors with a patchwork of items, including ladderback chairs, floral wallpaper, and hooked rugs. The space-age look of the 1950s was still on the horizon and Modernism was just beginning to move mainstream.

Credit: Better Homes & Gardens

Search This Blog

Home Construction

Where to go on holiday in March 2023 - Condé Nast Traveller