India Mahdavi

India Mahdavi (born 1962) is an Iranian-French architect and designer. She founded her Paris studio in the late 1990s and works chiefly in hospitality interiors, retail and residential design, and furniture. Her interiors are associated with saturated and unconventional colour palettes.

Her projects include the Hôtel du Cloître in Arles, the Coburg Bar at the Connaught in London, Monte Carlo Beach in Monaco, the Rivington Hotel in Manhattan, the Townhouse Hotel in Miami, and the Condesa DF hotel in Mexico City.

Early life and education

Mahdavi was born in 1962 in Tehran to a Persian father and an English-Egyptian mother. She spent part of her childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has attributed her interest in colour to American popular culture of the period, describing her early years in the United States as a time of very strong colours.

She was raised in the United States, Germany, and France. She studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1980 to 1986, and later studied furniture design at Parsons and graphic design at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Mahdavi met the restaurateur Jonathan Morr, who was planning a low-budget hotel that became the Townhouse Hotel in Miami. She travelled to Miami to see the building and became the designer of the 80-room hotel, an early commission in her interior design career.

Design career

After her studies, Mahdavi returned to France and worked as artistic director for Christian Liaigre for seven years, leaving in 1997 to work independently. She subsequently established her own studio in Paris, where she runs a studio, showroom, and shop within a short distance of one another on the rue Las Cases.

Hotels and restaurants

Mahdavi's design for The Gallery at Sketch, London

Mahdavi worked with Jonathan Morr on the Townhouse Hotel in Miami in 1999, a white interior with bright accents. Following Townhouse, she designed a series of hotels, restaurants, and bars including the Condesa DF hotel in Mexico City, work at the Connaught in London, and Le Germain in Paris. Le Germain's brasserie featured a 5-meter-tall (16 ft) resin silhouette of a woman and a 30-seat private cinema. She has also designed Ladurée locations in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Geneva, each using a pastel palette.

In 2014, Mahdavi was commissioned by Mourad Mazouz to redesign The Gallery, a restaurant within Sketch in Mayfair, London, as a setting for a body of work by the artist David Shrigley. Mahdavi's scheme was executed almost entirely in pink, including her Charlotte armchairs, and the walls were hung with 245 Shrigley drawings. Mahdavi described the space as an immersive installation of monochrome thought and said she wanted visitors to feel as though they were in a film.

In 2022, for Sketch's twentieth anniversary, Mahdavi replaced the pink interior with a yellow scheme designed around site-specific works by Yinka Shonibare.

Retail and residential

Mahdavi has designed retail spaces for Tod's and RedValentino, both of which incorporated pieces from her furniture line. Her residential work uses the same palette as her retail and hospitality projects.

Furniture

Mahdavi began designing furniture after founding her studio and has opened three showrooms on the rue Las Cases in Paris, the first in 2003 and two more in 2011 and 2020. The showrooms display her furniture alongside changing installations. A second line, Petits Objets, followed in 2011 and comprises functional and decorative pieces in the palette used across her interiors.

Collaborations

Mahdavi has collaborated with jewellery, hardware, ceramic, and paint manufacturers. An early collaboration was with the Paris jewellery company JEM in 2011, for which she adapted architectural forms to a small scale. Later projects include the Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades, designs for Nespresso, and a 56-shade paint range with Meriguet-Carrère in 2019. In 2020, she worked with Longwy Enamels on floral versions of her Bishop stool, first produced in 2003. Other collaborations include the Cogolin interior garden collection of 2015 and a De Gournay wallpaper in 2020.

Style and impact

Style

Mahdavi's work uses strong, cartoon-like colour; she has credited her background and upbringing as influences. The designer Yann Le Coadic, quoted in The New York Times, said that her work cannot be traced to a single influence or reference, that every detail is considered precisely, and that the overall effect is nonetheless uncontrived, because she designs for how a space will be lived in rather than for its visual impression.

Mahdavi has described her identity through the French term métissage, the cultural mixing of a society, calling herself a product of the Middle East by blood while noting that she came to know her birthplace only much later in life. She has said the delay gave the discovery an emotional charge, raising questions of what she had missed and how to integrate it into her present life.

Ralph Pucci, whose New York gallery has shown her furniture, characterised her work as balanced between humour and sophistication, arguing that an excess of either would tip it into kitsch or predictability.

Impact

The Gallery at Sketch attracted wide attention on social media, and its pink interior and Charlotte armchair became closely identified with Mahdavi. Of the reception, she said that she had changed the way people thought about pink. Asked about her legacy, she said she expected to be remembered as someone who used colour as her own language.

Influences and process

Mahdavi has cited location and her background as the drivers of her work. She has described herself as polyglot and polychrome, drawing on a range of cultures and locations and changing colour like a chameleon. She has said that she likes it when colours clash. To achieve the flat, cartoon-like quality of her interiors she favours bright colour and matte materials, preferring velvet to cotton or linen for its absorption of the palette.

Mahdavi has said that originality now depends on drawing on one's own reference library, and has cited her birthplace of Tehran as a source. The Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed has described her work as a form of childlike and joyous orientalism inspired by Iran, and as a fantastical image of the East.

Mahdavi has said that social media has not changed how she works, and attributes the photogenic quality of her interiors to a longstanding interest in cinema. She has said that she considered a career in film set design while at architecture school and that she has trained her eye to work like a camera.

Awards

• Designer of the Year, Maison et Objet, 2004
• Architectural Digest AD100, 2014
• Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 2015
• Interior Design Hall of Fame, 2019

Publications

Year	Title	Publisher	ISBN
2012	Home Chic	Flammarion	ISBN 978-2-08-020141-6
2018	Téhéran (Portraits de villes series)