Chromed Oval Mirror in the Art Deco Style

This large oval mirror achieves a rare balance between formal elegance and modernist restraint. The oval mirror plate, finished in a warm smoked grey that deepens and enriches reflected images rather than reproducing them faithfully, is enclosed within a chrome frame of notably refined design: its profile, visible from the side, is cut into multiple faceted steps that catch the light at varying angles, creating a subtle luminous accent around the perimeter of the glass. The chrome is polished to a high, consistent finish, its cool metallic quality playing against the atmospheric tone of the smoked glass.

The Art Déco style reference in the title is well-earned: the vocabulary of the piece — the oval form, the stepped chrome profile, the relationship between metallic precision and tinted glass — draws directly on the design language of the 1920s and ’30s, when French decorators and glassmakers pioneered the combination of geometric metal framing with coloured and smoked mirror glass. Here, reinterpreted for the early 1970s, the idiom is stripped of ornament but retains its essential character: a mirror that is also, emphatically, an object.

The smoked glass deserves particular attention. Rather than offering a straightforward reflection, it filters and transforms: faces appear with a slight distance, rooms take on a muted, cinematic quality, and the play of light across the glass surface shifts from moment to moment in ways that a clear mirror cannot achieve. This quality — at once practical and atmospheric — made smoked glass a favourite of interior designers in the 1970s, and it remains highly sought after by those furnishing spaces that value mood alongside function.

At 102 cm wide and 85 cm tall, this mirror has the scale to anchor a wall in a significant interior: a reception room, a master bedroom, a stylish bathroom, or a dressing room. The chrome frame, lightweight in appearance despite its architectural precision, does not compete with the surrounding decoration but frames and elevates it. A distinguished and well-preserved piece of French decorative design.