In pictures: Art Deco Icons

David Heathcote: First stop, Claridge’s Hotel - a playground for the rich and famous in the 1930s, transformed by Basil Ionides from a neo-baroque matronly hotel into a rendezvous for bright young things Photograph: Matt Prince

Ionides radically changed some rooms but left the entrance, pictured above, as a grand space. The walls and doors were jazzed up with mirrors, extra lights were added, and columns and glazing bars were covered in silver. The result was neither new nor old but bright and up-tempo - more modern, somehow Photograph: PR

The Claridge’s Fumoir – or smoking room - is deco at its most seductive. Art deco was the first design movement to openly apply to interior design the erotic associations of materials such as leather and velvet. What is particularly nice about the Fumoir is it's so deco it's freed from any sense of place but not mood or time - you enter into to an older, glamorous, more modern place far from London outside Photograph: Richard Booth

By contrast, Ionides's bedrooms at the hotel have a simple modernity that deco conveyed with more subtlety than modernists like Le Corbusier. The deco bedrooms at Claridge’s have been restored in the soft clear schemes Ionides loved. The furnishing of the rooms follows a style fashionable with many British deco designers that used bent beech plywood to create a streamlined assemblage of flush doors along with built-in and semi-built-in furniture Photograph: Damian Russell

When 55 Broadway was built it was the tallest office building in London and pristine white among the coal-blackened offices of London. Its deco qualifications are the skyscraper styling with those primal modern sculptures and ziggurat form. When it was new it must have added a sense of immanent Gotham drama, the throb of American dynamism to this part of the city Photograph: PR

Art deco was the first popular design aesthetic to focus on the pleasure of experiencing, consuming, design. The stations Charles Holden designed for the Underground in the 1930s may have been influenced by the simple, functional modernism of the German U-Bahn, the off-white interiors, streamlined plaster mouldings, bronze fittings, discreetly patterned tiling and arty posters added a sense of luxuriousness to public transport. But most luxurious of all was the lighting - which made stations such as Southgate into cinemas of transport Photograph: PR

The carriages of the Orient Express were everything the organisers of the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 wanted from modern design. They turned each compartment into a tiny luxurious salon with intricate floral pattern inlaid panels in exotic woods, lush woven fabrics and polished bronze - transforming the uncomfortable, rattling train into a grand hotel Photograph: PR

This is Casa del Rio – a remarkable art deco fantasy house hidden away in rural Devon.  It was built by Walter Price, a baker from Devon who went to visit California in the 1930s and who was so impressed by the residence of Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – that he decided to create his own deco mansion back in Devon. Though not our European, urban, idea of art deco, the suburban Hollywood Hispanic style took the arts and crafts respectability favoured by the American nouveaux riches and repackaged it into a boisterous celebration of dressed-up party fun Photograph: PR

The stair tower of the Casa del Rio is the dramatic centre of the house. A wonderful balcony has fabulous views across the house's steep sub-tropical garden of the house to the waters of the Yealm and the rich meadows of Devon. Its deco charm really comes from its very un-English showiness which force you to act up to its dramatic possibilities Photograph: PR