Come Home To… Manhattan Art Deco

If a luxury apartment in a stunning 1920s building in what’s arguably the world’s most exciting city is your idea of living, Gary Jones might just have the ideal home for you.

- Gary Jones

New York City in the 1920s was already a melting pot of peoples and ideas from every corner of the globe. With the urban centre besting London to become the most populous metropolis in the world, which was home to seven million industrious new citizens by the early 1930s, profound social change was underway in the Big Apple.

For those with cash, it was an exciting time of swaggering ambition, of pink gins and jazz. Fortunes were being made and New Yorkers were swept along on a tide of rampant consumerism. Noisy streets filled with cars and wild speculation in real estate fostered a foot-to-floor building boom never seen before.

To reflect the toe-tapping, finger-clicking zeitgeist, fashion-conscious Manhattan society fell head-over-its-high heels for Art Deco, the in-vogue design style emphasising clean, simplified lines to express the dynamism and sophistication of the modern age.

Soon, Art Deco was generously applied to everything from cigarette lighters to cinemas, from cufflinks and cutlery to salt shakers, as well as to the sky-scraping new hotels and office blocks springing up across the city.

Today, London, Paris, Miami, Shanghai, Chicago and Melbourne brag of their Art Deco architectural gems, but only New York City has the cloud-busting Empire State, the shimmering Chrysler Building, the distinctive 1929 Fuller Building that has housed some of the city’s leading art galleries, and several imposing, Gotham-esque edifices on Wall Street – potent symbols of the most go-getting metropolitan powerhouse on the planet.