A lot of furniture owes much of its shape and style to the various art movements of the time. In the early 20th century, Cubist, Post-Impressionist, Italian Futurist all lent their styles to the birth of Art Deco. With all these styles, furniture became much more than storage and shelving units. In some cases they were more like sculptures or works of art, though many people today prefer their furniture to be practical as well as attractive, perhaps putting more emphasis on its storage utility than its artistic values.

In 1925 at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratif et Industriels, Moderne, later known as Art Deco was first introduced to the world. The Exposition had originally been scheduled for 1912 but was postponed. American designers were invited to the Exposition but felt they had nothing ‘modern’ to exhibit.
Later, however, various museums and department stores across the USA held their own exhibitions of the new style. Thus began the American search for their own individual style of Art Deco. As with the Italian Futurists, the American designers gained a great deal of their inspiration from the inventions of the era, machines, cars and aeroplanes for example.

In Britain, several Art Deco designers were making their mark, including an architect, Sir Edward Maule, who, in the spirit of Frank Lloyd-Wright, the American architect and Modernist designer, had turned his architectural skills to furniture design. He designed and built work tables that were exhibited at the Exposition in Paris in 1925 and although it was rather an exotic style for English Art Deco at the time, it was considered to be one of the few storage pieces comparable to those of the French designers.