Presque invites you to a rare, exclusively interwar Art Déco collection sourced from private homes across Paris.

A living room with a fireplace, modern wall sconces, a large framed artwork of a dog in a tree, a staircase with wooden steps, a curved sofa, and a coffee table with decorative objects.
A living room with a fireplace, modern wall sconces, a large framed artwork of a dog in a tree, a staircase with wooden steps, a curved sofa, and a coffee table with decorative objects.
Living room with fireplace, abstract wall art, staircase, and modern decor.
Living room with fireplace, abstract wall art, staircase, and modern decor.
A black and white photo of a stylish living room with a fireplace, modern wall sconces, a large painting, a staircase, and various decorative objects.

How it all began…

Between roughly 1920 and late 1930s, something happened in design that hasn't happened since. Geometry, craft, and material intelligence converged into objects as ambitious as the buildings around them. Furniture stopped imitating earlier centuries and began arguing for its own. Then the war came, and broke it. What came after was made for mass production and ultra-capitalism; most of what surrounds us now descends from that turn. The pieces that survived remind us we were capable of more.

I grew up in Chicago, surrounded by Art Déco before I knew the name for it. The Carbide & Carbon Building, the Board of Trade, the lobby of the Palmolive — a skyline shaped by American architects who had crossed the Atlantic to study in Paris and come back changed. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs gave the style its name and gave Chicago its century. I rode past those facades for years without seeing them.

Paris, where I lived for many years, taught me something the other cities couldn't. It is a city that has decided, over centuries, that beauty in public is worth the cost, that a façade, a balcony, a doorway should carry the same care as the rooms behind them. Heritage is not preserved here; it is lived in. Walking those streets reshaped what I thought a designed object was for. There's a feeling I get in front of an Art Déco object that I can't fully name. Something like falling inward. Searching for a meaning I can sense but can't reach. Architecture you can only look at. Painting you can only stand before. Furniture, you live with. You sit in it. You open its drawers. The patina on the brass handle is from a hundred years of someone's hand. It's the closest anyone now alive can get to that decade. That's where I stayed.

Presque exists to bring those pieces here. Only Art Déco, only 1920 to 1930s, only from France; because France is where it began.

Eric ZHANG

A young man sits on a knitted pouf in a living room with large windows and curtains, looking to the side. The room has a sofa, a coffee table with a jar and some items, and a wall with a large framed photograph of an empty room with a piano.
A car driving on a paved road surrounded by trees and a grassy field.
A landscape painting of a countryside scene with trees, a stone bridge, hills, and a cloudy sky.
See our Collection >>
Interior of a luxurious room with a chandelier, antique furniture, decorative vases, and artwork.
A detailed painting of a living room with curtains, a fireplace, and shelves with decorative items.
Interior of a room with decorative ceiling art, a mirror above a sink, a green chair, a cabinet with a sculpture, and a painting or window showing an outdoor scene.