Art Deco Dressing Table

Between the carved almirahs and the caned diwans, India's furniture history holds one more great love affair and this is what it looked like. In the middle of the last century, the cities fell for Deco, the cinema-hall curve, the rounded corner, the polished surface with not one flower carved into it and the dressing table became the style's favourite home in the Indian bedroom. Ask anyone over fifty about their mother's dressing table and watch the description match this piece.

The form is pure streamline. On the left, three drawers ride in a rounded-shoulder stack, sprung handles set flat, holding everything a dressing table has always held, the kajal, the safety pins, the letters that were never for the almirah.

From the drawer unit the top sweeps right into a rounded ledge and below it two more open shelves follow the same curve, a waterfall of three surfaces for perfume bottles, combs and the comb's permanent understudy, ending in a soft bullnose edge with no corner anywhere to catch a hip in a dark bedroom.

Above, the tall rectangular mirror stands full and plain between its uprights, big enough to dress by, honest enough to argue with. The polish runs deep and dark across every surface, the shine doing the decorating that carving does on our other pieces.