The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.
I enjoy how women dressed in the 1920s with the shimmering jewels and rich feathers.
My inspiration for interior design is more historical than traditional.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.
I love vintage and prints.
I'm putting on a suit and tie when I go see The Great Gatsby.
Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.
I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.
Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.
The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.
I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style.
Always the light fixtures I love are Italian, from the '50s and '60s. I'm like, 'What's that? I want it!' And it's always $40,000 vintage Italian.
It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'
I'm so fond of abstract design in the style of Vanderbilt and David Hicks and that whole 1970s era. They took the 1930s and gave it a bit of technicolour.
I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school.
The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.
In the 1930s, anyone of any sophisticated status owned a cocktail shaker. Distinctive ones are easy to find.
When I'm in London, Claridge's is a great favourite. I'm a big fan of art deco architecture and the rooms are extraordinary.
It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.
I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.
I've always loved the fashion of the '30s and everything that came with the Art Deco era - the jewelry and the glamour.
I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.
Phryne Fisher could walk down the red carpet; Essie Davis is something else.
