July 2026 | With India Mahdavi

India Mahdavi Portrait — © Alice Rosatti

As I write these lines, the second Arab Design Now Biennale in Doha was postponed to next November, as yet another senseless war disrupted the fragile rhythm of our world. This year’s jury president is none other than design icon India Mahdavi.
I’m happy to call India a close friend. A woman whose company is always enriching and disarmingly joyful. It feels as though I have known her for years through extended family and Parisian degrees of separation. Many roads seem to lead to India, the so-called Queen of Color, a title that only begins to capture her. So many roads, in fact, that recounting them all would take us too far from the conversation I wish to open here. Her mother’s roots trace back many Coptic generations in Egypt, while her Parisian network has often intersected with mine, making our meeting almost inevitable.
I remember an impromptu dinner in Paris with a few mutual friends. India was preparing a speech for an official distinction she was about to receive, and we became her test audience. I can still hear Joanna, Péri and Aurélia laughing when I referred to her as the Madonna of Design.
Beyond the familiar labels, I struggle to think of another woman in recent history whose work in architecture and design has had such a distinct and lasting cultural impact. To me, like Madonna, she has shaped a language of her own, one that is instantly recognizable yet constantly evolving where she masterfully plays with nostalgia.
I was first exposed to India’s vision in the mid-90s, during her time as Art Director for Christian Liaigre, where a certain radical simplicity revealed itself with striking clarity. Around that time, she also erected a towering resin silhouette of a woman at Le Germain in Paris, a gesture both bold and quietly subversive. That same singular vision would later unfold in projects such as Sketch in London, where she transformed a dining room into an immersive, almost surreal environment of pink velvet and drawings by David Shrigley.
I was once advised, here and there, to be more measured in my admiration of others, as though recognizing brilliance elsewhere might somehow diminish one’s own. I have always felt the opposite to be true. It takes a certain clarity to recognize talent, and perhaps even a form of confidence to celebrate it openly.
Talent, in particular, is what I first recognized in India’s work.
Today, India’s presence is unmistakably anchored on rue Las Cases in Saint-Germain, where her studio, showroom and project room form a singular ecosystem. Less a collection of spaces than a world of its own, one that resists easy definition.
Born to a Persian father and an Egyptian mother, raised between Massachusetts, Germany and France, and educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Parsons and the School of Visual Arts, India embodies a form of cultural fluidity that quietly expands what identity can mean. Her life and work have been widely documented, so rather than retracing what is already known, I prepared a set of questions that celebrate some of the cross-cultural aspects of her journey, ones that have helped me and probably many of us from mixed cultural backgrounds to feel represented.
I’m honored to share this exchange, captured in print, where it belongs.

Dearest India, your multicultural upbringing clearly shaped the voice that is so uniquely yours. Yet you have become strongly associated with Paris and its design scene, which is not always known for its openness to what lies beyond its own codes. Do you agree and if so how do you explain it?

When I established my studio on rue Las Cases in 1999, I was essentially working abroad, the Townhouse Hotel in Miami, Condesa DF in Mexico City, houses in London. I was based in Paris but nobody seemed to know it. Everyone assumed I lived elsewhere.
So in 2004 I turned the ground floor into a showroom, simply to have a visible Parisian presence. And from there it grew organically. Today rue Las Cases is an entire ecosystem, the studio, a shop for the petits objets, and two exhibition spaces, the Project Room and the Tiny Room. Each space reflects a different facet of how I work and what I care about.
It is an unusual way of functioning. Most design studios operate within the logic of commission and client. What I built on rue Las Cases operates according to a different logic entirely, one of curiosity, transmission, and creative autonomy. A community of talents gathered around shared values rather than a shared brief.
I didn’t wait for Paris to shape me. I shaped my Paris.

You recently created an immersive scenography for the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition dedicated to Pierre Bonnard. How did that project come about, and what drew you to engaging with his work in this way?

This was 2023, so not so recent, but it remains a project I think about often.
I was invited by Tony Ellwood and the NGV in Melbourne to approach the Pierre Bonnard exhibition not as a neutral scenographer but as someone with a personal relationship to his work. That connection, between his vision and mine, was the premise from the start.
The space I was given was enormous. Two thousand square meters, six-meter-high volumes. My immediate instinct was that Bonnard’s paintings would simply be lost in that configuration, swallowed by the architecture. So I found a different approach. I created wallpapers drawn from the patterns that appear in his own canvases, turning the exhibition space into an abstraction of a domestic interior. A kind of mise en abîme, his world reflected within itself, at a scale you could actually inhabit.
My own furniture completed the gesture, bringing the rooms down to a human, domestic scale. The result was intensely immersive, and joyful in the way Bonnard himself is joyful, which is not a small thing for an artist who remains less widely known than he deserves.
It was a considerable success. And a reminder that the frame around a work of art is never neutral.

You also completed POMO in Trondheim with architect Erik Langdalen. How did this collaboration begin, and how did you approach designing for a contemporary museum in that context?

POMO is one of my most recent projects, and in many ways one of the most significant, my first institutional project, and my first in Norway. Both firsts at once, which made it particularly exciting.
I was appointed Creative Director, which meant approaching the building not just as a space to renovate but as an identity to construct. The brief was a four-storey former post office in the heart of Trondheim, a city with a strong relationship to its own history, its craftsmanship, its particular light and colour.
What interested me most was the question of hospitality in an institutional context. A museum is neither a restaurant nor a hotel, yet it must welcome, it must make people feel that the space belongs to them. I focused on the interstitial spaces, the in-between areas that are so often neglected, treating them as moments of visual stimulation, vibrations between the neutrality of the exhibition rooms.
The fuchsia glass entrance, the pink ash wood shop, the mandarine steel staircase, the reading room with its folkloric ornamentation, the lounge conceived as a domestic interior, the raw basement project space, each fragment has its own identity, yet together they form a coherent whole. The colours were drawn from Trondheim itself, from Norwegian craft traditions, from the building’s own memory.
The main exhibition spaces remain deliberately minimal. The punctuation happens everywhere else. That contrast is what gives POMO its character, rigour and joy, held together in the same building.

I’ve yet to visit your house in Arles but I’ve seen photographs. You seem to spend an increasing amount of time there. What drew you there, and what does that space represent for you? Should Paris be worried?

My relationship with Arles goes back a long time. I first came with my son’s father, the photographer Derek Hudson, to attend Les Rencontres d’Arles. Then Maja Hoffmann, who founded the Luma Foundation, invited me to work on several projects there, and I never really stopped coming.
In 2018, through Maja, I encountered this house. It reminded me immediately of my parents’ property in Tehran, the same scale of garden, the same quality of vegetation, something in the air that felt deeply familiar without being explicable. I bought it for its possibilities. And possibilities have always interested me more than realities.
I had originally been looking for a small apartment in the old city, something with a view. I ended up with a large house, a park, and an office that allows me to continue working from here. Which says something, I think, about how life tends to exceed what we plan for it.
Should Paris be worried? No. But Arles has given me something Paris cannot, a different rhythm, a different relationship to time. And that, at this point in my life, feels essential.

Let’s cross the Mediterranean to Egypt, your mother’s homeland, where I now live and where I’ve been lucky enough to see you often. What has your relationship to Egypt been over time, and what is it today?

I came to Egypt late. I was twenty-eight when I first saw the Nile, and I cried. Something in me recognised a place I had never been.
But it took time before I truly found my way in. There came a point in my life when I felt like a plant in a pot with no soil left, and I understood it was time to reconnect with both my homelands, Iran and Egypt. That reconnection happened, as the most important things do, through people.
Through my mother’s cousin Ikram Nakhla, I became connected to Mounir Neamatalla, who was already working on what would become Adrère Amellal in the Siwa Oasis. I first went in 1998. My son Miles was two years old. We arrived after a full day’s drive, in pitch-black night, guided only by stars and bonfires. I remember the feeling as if it were yesterday ,a sense of belonging to the earth, to the universe. Adrère was not yet operating as it does today, but all of Mounir’s principles were already in place: no electricity, vernacular architecture built around the mountain, produce from the organic garden.
I grew to know Mounir by doing what I always do, giving advice when no one has asked for it. What I found in him was a man who not only listened but acted immediately. Each time I returned, which became twice a year, the improvements were already in place. We would walk the construction sites together, a carbon copy notepad in hand, one copy for me, one for the workers. For new buildings, we would trace outlines in the sand with a bucket of salt. Construction would begin within hours. Window placements were decided according to the views we wanted to frame. There were no predefined plans, no drawings. It was architecture conceived as sculpture, modelled like sculpture.
Eventually Mounir invited me to design his private house in Tamazid, built on a rock formation in the middle of the palm trees. It was my first true work of architecture. I wanted to honour the vernacular spirit of Adrère while pushing toward something more contemporary, a rectangle over two floors, high ceilings, large rooms, almost like a loft in the desert. New finishes, new proportions, a redefined typology for everything: window frames, doors, furniture.
One of the things I am most proud of from those years is the salt objects. I had the idea of using the salt harvested from Siwa’s lakes as a material in its own right ,beginning with light votives, where the crystals catch candlelight in the most magical way. The Siwi people understood the possibilities immediately. Today there is not a single shop in the oasis that doesn’t sell salt objects. That, I think, was my real contribution to Siwa.
More recently, my mother has been able to reappropriate some family properties in Cairo, and I love coming there to be with her. We have had the best time together. Egypt has become, over all these years, something I didn’t expect, not just a homeland recovered, but a place of genuine joy.

You’ve been actively present in Egypt in recent years, as a judge in Cairo, participating in Art d’Égypte, and through more personal projects. How do you perceive the current energy surrounding the Egyptian design scene?

The design scene in Cairo has been evolving in an incredible way, through initiatives like Art d’Égypte, but also through creative emerging voices like your own, Omar, whose work in alabaster is redefining what Egyptian craft can mean today. That energy, felt across the entire MENA region, is something I find genuinely moving. It makes me proud in a way that feels personal, not professional.
I am honoured to be president of the jury for the Doha Design Prize, whose second biennale takes place next November. It will be a significant moment, I expect to see projects of real ambition and surprise. And beyond the prize itself, Doha next year will celebrate Egypt in all its dimensions, which feels like a remarkable opportunity for Egyptian creativity to reach a much wider audience.
There is something happening in this part of the world that the rest of the design world is only beginning to understand. I feel fortunate to be close to it.

Iran, your father’s homeland, has long occupied a complex place in global narratives. You once dedicated a sold out beautiful little Portrait de Villes by Be-Poles éditions (now A.S.L) to photographs taken in Tehran. What is your personal connection to Iran, and how has it shaped you?

When I think of Iran and what it has been through, and continues to go through, I want to cry. I feel deeply for a population that has been suffering for far too long. And now this war, which has been a disaster in every sense of the word.
Yet my attachment to Iran has never wavered. If anything, it has deepened. There is so much there, so much poetry, so much beauty, so much humanity, that no political circumstance can erase. I will continue to go back, to connect, to be inspired. It is part of who I am, and that is not something I am willing to surrender.
The little book of Tehran photographs was a private gesture, really. A way of holding on to something I loved at a moment when holding on felt necessary. I think many people from the diaspora will understand that impulse.

I often feel that living between worlds that do not fully understand one another can be both enriching and exhausting. You seem to navigate these multiple identities with remarkable balance. Do you feel at home everywhere, or is there a place where you feel most rooted?

I feel at home everywhere and nowhere. And I have come to terms with that, more than that, I feel content with it. What once might have felt like a lack I now understand as a form of richness. To be able to navigate between worlds, between cultures, between ways of seeing, it is a gift, even when it is also a weight.
But perhaps the question of roots is simpler than we make it. Are we not all, at the end of the day, creatures of the same planet? The borders we draw, between nations, between identities, between belonging and not belonging, are so much more fragile than we pretend.
My roots are with the people I love. That is the only ground that has never shifted beneath me.

We share a love of cinema, and I know you once considered filmmaking. You are also a deeply perceptive photographer. Do you see yourself opening that door fully at some point?

It remains a fantasy, and a persistent one. Cinema has always been present in how I work not as reference but as method. The way Kubrick constructs atmosphere, the way Fellini inhabits a scene before anyone speaks, the way Visconti uses space and colour as emotional language. These are not influences I admire from a distance, they are part of how I think.
Photography is already there, quietly. It is how I look when I am not designing, which means it is perhaps how I look most honestly.
But to open that door fully, to filmmaking, I would need two things I don’t always have. The mental space to truly engage, to slow down enough to inhabit a different creative rhythm. And a mentor. Someone who believes in the possibility and says so. I have always worked better when someone pushes me toward what I am already moving toward.
Perhaps that person is still to come.

Can you tell us more about what the India Mahdavi Project Rooms and Editions represent within your broader practice?

The Project Room came in 2020, when I took over a space at 29 rue de Bellechasse, a forty square meter cubic box with a large street window. Intimate yet expansive enough to fully express something. Its position aligned perfectly with rue Las Cases, completing the ecosystem I had been building organically since 1999.
The idea was to create a nexus, not just a showcase for my own work, but a genuine cultural platform open to the entire international design community, particularly the voices from the global South that fascinate and inspire me. In four years we have reached thirteen editions, hosting galleries like Carwan from Athens and AGO Projects from Mexico City, celebrating the Villa Noailles centenary, launching my monograph. At each opening the space overflows beyond its walls and into the street, which is exactly what I wanted.
The Tiny Room came next, a more intimate space dedicated entirely to a younger generation of designers. Wendy Andreu, Les Crafties, Steven Coëffic, Carles et Démarquet. It is where transmission happens in the most concrete sense. Not mentorship in any formal way, simply making space, literally, for what is coming next.
Together they form the part of my practice that belongs to no client and no brief. That freedom is what makes them essential.

You have built a body of work that feels both singular and expansive, across interiors, architecture, objects and collaborations. Is there a project that remains particularly close to your heart? And if so, why?

The Villa Médicis holds a place apart in my work, not just as a project, but as an experience that carries a meaning well beyond interior design.
It began with the Réenchanter la Villa Médicis commission, six historic rooms on the piano nobile, including the salon Lili Boulanger, the chambre Debussy and the chambre Galilée, alongside the three cardinal apartments open to the public. The brief was to propose a new reading of these spaces, working alongside the Mobilier National and some of the finest French and Italian artisans, marquetry, ceramics, weaving, cabinetmaking. The challenge was to bring geometry and colour into rooms saturated with 16th century frescoes by Jacopo Zucchi and the wall paintings of Balthus, without competing with them. I designed beds, tables, chairs and rugs that serve as observation points toward the surrounding heritage, furniture that looks at the art rather than away from it.
Now I am working on the chambre turque, which is not yet open, a different and in some ways more personal chapter. The room carries layers of imagined Orient, filtered through the European gaze of painters like Horace Vernet. What I am doing is adding my own layer, not to correct that history but to inhabit it differently. An appropriation of an appropriation, as it were. My plural oriental heritage, Iranian-Egyptian, meeting an imagined one.
There is something that moves me deeply about being in that lineage. To think that I, as a woman, as someone of Iranian and Egyptian origins, will have left my mark in a place where Balthus, Jacopo Zucchi, Peduzzi and so many others left theirs. That is not something I take for granted. It feels like a form of recognition that goes far beyond a commission.

RAPID ROUND

Name a film

The Party, Blake Edwards

Name a song

Kind of Blue, Miles Davis

Name an object

The Bishop, my ceramic stool

Name a dish

Chelo kabab, the Iranian national dish

Name a restaurant

Chez Georges, Paris

Name a city