London's Victoria and Albert Museum has salvaged and restored a 1930s art deco hotel foyer as one of the highlights of its exhibition calendar for the new year.

The museum is spending more than �100,000 on repairing the glamorous Hollywood-style foyer, which was rescued from Strand Palace Hotel, in the capital's West End, in 1969.

With its sweeping staircase, elegant lighting and marble, the foyer is considered one of the finest examples of the art deco movement.

It will act as the centrepiece of a full exhibition dedicated to the style of the period at the V&A in March. It will feature more than 300 works, including paintings, sculpture, glass and jewellery.

A Tamara de Lempicka painting is one of more than 300 works on display

The museum hopes the exhibition will prove as popular with the public as its record-breaking exhibition on art nouveau in 2000, which received 230,000 visitors.

Art deco flourished between the two world wars. It brought exoticism to traditionally sedate precious and exclusive works of art as well as to mass produced objects.

The museum says its show will be the first to explore art deco as a global phenomenon affecting cities as far apart as Paris, New York, Bombay and Shanghai.

Phenomenon

Ghislaine Wood, curator of the exhibition, said: "For much of this century art deco has been dismissed as a purely hedonistic and frivolous style.

"The exhibition will explore how art deco in fact represented new values and responded to human needs through the conscious celebration of fantasy, fun, glamour and commerce.

Lighter-makers Ronson showed how Art Deco spread to all areas of design

"It became a universal phenomenon transforming the look of everything from factories and cinemas to fashion and photography."

Other highlights of the show will include a selection of works from Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann's influential Art Deco Grand Salon, shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1925.

They included pieces made by Cartier, fashion by Coco Channel, paintings by Fernand Leger and sculptures by Constantin Brancusi.

Tour

The art deco period began in 1910 when art nouveau slid out of fashion.

Its highpoint was in 1925 at the Paris exhibition and the style culminated at the New York World's Fair in 1939.

The term art deco came about in 1966 and was taken from the Paris exhibition's title, L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.

A Ruhlmann dressing-table is another highlight of the show

Before this, the style was known by a variety of terms including jazz moderne, streamline moderne or moderne.

After its run in London - from 27 March to 20 July - the V&A show will go on tour.

It will travel to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco and end at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, US in Autumn 2004.