Port-hole windows to ship balconies: The maritime influences in Panjim’s art deco heritage

2025 is considered the centenary year for art deco. Short for the French “Arts décoratifs”, art deco is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first appeared in Paris in the 1910s (just before World War I), and caught on all over the world in the following decades. But the term “art deco” came into popular use after the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris.

My wife Chryselle is an art deco enthusiast and wrote about Panjim’s rich art deco heritage for Architectural Digest India several years ago. It was on a Panjim heritage walk led by both of us (where I focused on history and she pointed out and described the detailing in the art deco buildings we encountered on the way) for the Serendipity Arts Festival some years ago that we first met Leaxan Freitas, a young man passionate about so many aspects of Goan heritage.

He is certainly an expert on art deco in Goa; the exhaustive archive on his Instagram handle Goenchi Deco is testament to his painstaking work crisscrossing the length and breadth of our state, seeking out and lovingly photographing examples of the art form that often...

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