The short version. Deco is the most decorative this collection gets, and it stays the right side of kitsch because the decoration was structural: the fins, the teardrops and the speed lines were what designers genuinely believed fast should look like. These four are painted in that palette, gold and black and emerald and cream, and they are the ones that make a room look considered rather than enthusiastic.
The four
Deco Grand Tourer is the full statement: a streamlined 1930s grand tourer in gold, black and emerald, chrome speed lines running the length of it, a bold geometric sunburst behind. It is the piece to hang if you only hang one, and it is deliberately the loudest thing in the collection.
Speed Record is a land-speed racer arrowing across the salt flats under radiating geometric sun rays. Record attempts were the decade's obsession and they produced the strangest-looking cars anybody has built, because nothing about them had to be practical. Machine-age glamour, held still.
Deco Metropolis takes the car into the architecture: an elegant coupe in front of stepped skyscrapers and a stylised moon, in midnight blue, gold and cream. This is the one that proves the point about cars and buildings, because you cannot easily say which half of the picture is doing the work.
Deco Riviera is the holiday. An open roadster on the corniche above a geometric sea with a liner on the horizon, in the travel-poster idiom the decade invented. It is the lightest of the four and the easiest to live with in a room people actually sit in.
Hanging deco
Gold and emerald on a dark ground is a strong decision, so these want space rather than company. One of them centred on a wall does more than two of them side by side, and they are the pieces most likely to be bought at a size larger than the buyer first intended. They also take a natural wood frame better than the collection average, because the warm metallics in the palette pick the wood up.
If the geometry appeals more than the glamour, the single-line work is the austere version of the same instinct. If the period is what you are after rather than the styling movement, the vintage posters cover the same years in a different register. The wall handles size and framing.
