It could be straight from an episode of
Poirot.
This smoking room,
Les Palmiers (1930-36), designed by Jean Dunand for the Parisian apartment of Mademoiselle Collette Aboucaya on rue de Monceau, is the height of Art Deco decadence. And, though we are now in the age of vaping not smoking, it is now coming up for sale at Phillips in London on 4 May, estimated at £1.5m to £2m.
In 1925, Dunand had been invited to design a smoking room for the French Embassy Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes Aboucaya. For the first time, he used lacquer panels on the walls and his lacquer designs for the car interiors of the coachbuilder Henri Binder were also shown at the exhibition. Aboucaya, whose father and uncle had recently bought Binder s firm, was impressed by Dunand s work and commissioned him to design this smoking room for her own apartment. As the name suggests, the room s design evokes stylised palm trees, luxuriously render