India Mahdavi - Harper's BAZAAR September 2023
Having lived in four countries before high school, architect and designer India Mahdavi had to learn to communicate beyond language. Where words fail, she turns to colour
In 2014, India Mahdavi changed how people thought about pink. Specifically, the Pantone shade Rose Quartz 13-520. The Iranian-French architect and designer saturated Sketch restaurant at the Gallery of London in a very specific blueish-pink that took one month out of the project’s three-month schedule to find. The restaurant became the city’s most Instagrammed, and Rose Quartz 13-520 became one of Pantone’s colours of the year in 2016. About the same time, Véronique Hyland coined the term ‘millennial pink’ in an essay wondering why everything marketed to her was suddenly in this shade of “ironic pink, pink without the sugary prettiness”. Well, it began with Mahdavi.
Until Mahdavi touched it, the gallery went through a redesign every two years. Her rose quartz paradise stayed for eight — until she was invited to overhaul it again last year. When I ask why she chose yellow for the new Sketch, she politely corrects me: it’s not yellow, it’s gold — actually, it’s not gold, either. The colour of the new Sketch is “warmth”.
Mahdavi, dubbed the “virtuoso of colour” by The New York Times, uses colour to communicate beyond words. If colour is her mother tongue, paint swatches are her alphabet. A certain green makes her thirsty; that’s not pink, that’s a crushed piece of fruit. So yes, of course, Sketch is warmth, not yellow.
Despite no two being the same, a Mahdavi-designed space is instantly recognisable for her densely saturated colours — muted by plush velvet or amplified with high-shine lacquer — and something else that’s hard to put your finger on. Mahdavi calls it a “vibration”, which she achieves it by letting her colours communicate with one another. There’s harmony and tension, but always with a wink. “I see colours as friends,” she says. “I like the way they converse. When you have a whole bunch of friends together, the more diverse they are, the better it is. If you always invite the same type of people, they’re just going to agree. It’s not going to create any arguments or conversations or vibration.”
While we’re speaking over Zoom, Mahdavi is wearing black and sitting in front of a white wall and dark bookshelf (grey to this untrained eye) in her Paris headquarters. There’s no colour to be seen on the screen, but it’s immediately apparent her mind is swimming in it — it always has been.
Mahdavi was born in 1962 in Tehran to an Iranian father and Egyptian mother. When she was 18 months old, the family moved to the United States, where Mahdavi says she had a “technicolour” and “very happy” childhood. It was the golden age of American animation, and colour television was relatively new in households. Mahdavi remembers being captivated by the pop brights of Tex Avery animations (Bugs Bunny et al.), Mickey Mouse and Peanuts cartoons.
When she was six, the family moved to Germany, and eventually to the south of France. At 17, she studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then relocated to New York where she studied graphic, furniture and industrial design.
It was the Miami Beach’s Townhouse Hotel, one of her earliest commissions, in 1999, that set the tone for the India Mahdavi effect. It was to be a summer oasis, but with no way to build a swimming pool, Mahdavi instead invoked the feeling of being poolside by creating a roof terrace dotted with wide red waterbeds in front of a fountain, and using a colour palette inspired by sand and sky. There was no pool, but it certainly didn’t feel that way.
“I try to create spaces that are actually emotional experiences, where people can feel different,” she says. “There is a relation to space, to that moment, to the time you’re there, where you’re taken somewhere else. It can give you that moment of happiness or joy that one should have. Your environment can really change your feelings.”
These days, there are India Mahdavi-designed spaces in Europe, the US and Japan. She has collaborated on retail spaces and products with Tod’s, RedValentino, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. She has made homewares capsule collections for H&M Home and Monoprix, the French supermarket chain. She created a paint line with Mériguet- Carrère and collaborated with de Gournay on a wallpaper design. Her Bishop stool is now in the permanent collection of Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. She has also built a mini Mahdavi-verse, where along one street in Paris she has her headquarters and three showrooms, as well as an ever-changing gallery-slash-window space on the corner.
In the past year alone, she has released three major works in addition to the new Sketch. She redesigned the interiors of Rome’s 16th-century Villa Medici, once home to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the most challenging project of her life, she says. “It’s from the Renaissance period, so it’s very intimidating — how do you bring more beauty to the villa when it’s already so amazing?” She created a scenography for the National Gallery of Victoria’s immersive Pierre Bonnard exhibition, a fitting pairing, given both Mahdavi and the French impressionist-turned-modernist painter have a fascination with colour, memory and domestic spaces. (See our photoshoot in the gallery on page 204.) “I love the way he invites us to his home. He’s painting everyday life, but making it so special,” she says. Perhaps most unexpectedly, she also drained her work completely of colour in a collection for Carwan Gallery in Athens. “The gallery’s owner said to me, ‘I would like to do a collection without any colour. What happens to you?’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re taking my DNA away,’” she says with a laugh.
“That’s what’s fun about this profession,” she adds. “Life brings you projects that you never expected you would do. It’s true that people like to put everybody in boxes: ‘Are you an architect, interior designer, a product designer or a textile designer?’ Why should I stop at that? I’ve been crossing borders this whole time. I’m from Egypt and Iran, I grew up in the United States, France and Germany. All my life I’ve been crossing borders. This is who I am and how I like to think your creativity can express itself on many different levels.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Lillie Thompson.
