Bishop

Born in 1999, the Bishop has become one of Mahdavi’s iconic pieces and has entered the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Initially designed in gold as a high stool for the private club APT in New York, the Bishop stool gave birth to a wooden side table before being adapted to its final form in ceramic, developed for the Condesa Hotel in Mexico.

Named after the chess piece that never follows a straight line, but only moves diagonally, the Bishop has an unusual height between a chair and a side table  – therefore serving multiple purposes. Both a side table and a stool, it is available in eighteen colors and can be used indoors and outdoors.

The Bishop has its own fitted accessories: the Peanut tray, which sits on two Bishops to create a double side table, and the COD (complément d’objet direct: the direct object in the grammatical sense), which transforms the Bishop into a larger side or cocktail table.

The Bishop inspired an exhibition at the Pierre Bergé gallery in Brussels, ‘My Name is Bishop,’ where the Bishop was displayed in materials ranging from plaster, salt, wax, Italian marbles, and rattan, mostly in limited editions. Most recently, the Bishop has been enameled by the famous French Manufacture des Emaux de Longwy, applying their famous blue apple blossom pattern in cloissoné technique.

Le Germain Paradisio

The 30-seat German Paradiso opened in 2010 as the very first private cinema in Paris. The wholly curved space, enhanced by the rounded furniture and the use of rich materials, contrasts with the Café Germain right above.

Mahdavi’s committed architectural stance, inspired by a contemporary jungle setting, planted a nocturnal Eden in a studded peacock blue leather and primary-colored baizes. A lion, a bird on a branch, a flower: the naturalist repertoire gestates around pop and abstract patterns, inspired by ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau. This space is fully curved and rounded for a cinema conceived as an imaginary world, where you can choose a film and have dinner, sheltered from the light and the noise of the city whose heart throbs immediately above.

H&M Home

Another exploration of her fascination with color’s mood-influencing power, Mahdavi has teamed up with Swedish brand H&M to launch a colorful new collection that uses natural materials and bespoke ceramics to add a pop of color to everyday life.

Key pieces in the exclusive collection include a variety of alluring ceramics produced in Europe, such as iconic plates, serving bowls and vases, and exquisite Indian-woven textiles in natural materials in the form of cushions, a blanket and a large rug.

The India Mahdavi x H&M Home collection is developed from a craftmanship perspective – making the artisanal knowledge a main focus – while also capturing the designer’s desire to democratize her work and make it accessible to everyone, transcending the luxury realm.

With gradient color plays, bright hues, and out-of-focus graphics, Mahdavi was inspired by the blinding colors you see when you close your eyes in front of the sun. This collection was conceived like a wind of optimism in a world of uncertainty.

REDValentino

Located on London’s renowned Sloane Street, this is the original store from which the REDValentino concept was derived.

The idea was to enter a dream without the feeling of being in a store. Mahdavi aimed to design a concept and identity elements that would free themselves from a function – like entering a world that belongs to the REDValentino girl, encouraging her desire to dream. In this store, illusion prevails in a multidimensional space with the integration of a tender, surrealist pink and a dreamlike stream of mirrors.

The brass and enameled ceramic, the Charlotte armchairs, and the Rubik and Lolita display stands are an invitation to a sensorial journey.

Cavallino Maranello

For the design of Ferrari’s iconic Cavallino restaurant, located across from the entrance to the Maranello factory in Modena, Mahdavi created a contemporary reinterpretation of the space – bringing back to the forefront the authentic simplicity of a cult destination. A further expression of the brand’s passion and excellence, the trattoria continues to preserve the emotions, successes and memories that have marked the history of Ferrari within its original walls, evoking the very origins of the company and the powerful, pioneering spirit of its founder, Enzo Ferrari.

To restore the trattoria’s modernity and infuse it with a new identity, Mahdavi revisited Ferrari’s heritage and visual vocabulary. Using digitization and enlargement, the automaker’s prancing horse logo was pixelized to create a unique identity for the restaurant. The pixelized Cavallino was applied on many surfaces and materials – on perforated metal for the entrance gate, glass mosaic on the walls, on the restaurant’s wallpaper, and even in the Burano lace that adorns the white net curtains on the windows, as in any self-respecting trattoria.

Ladurée Aoyama

Set on one of Tokyo’s hippest and most buzzed-about streets – Omotesando – the 50-seat Ladurée tea salon and boutique lies at barely a stone’s throw away from the vibrant Harajuku pedestrian shopping street, Takeshita Dori.

Mahdavi’s architectural concept pays homage to ancient regime-inspired whimsy and grandeur, as shown by the massive mirror echoing Versailles’ hall of mirrors. The macaron house unravels around two dominant colors: celadon green, which is to be found in the tiles and cushions, and bonbon pink walls.

Mahdavi elevates what could be a kawaii-cute tone with sophisticated, tongue-in-cheek flourishes. Twisting candy-stick tables sprout from a graphic, grey and white marble floor; blown glass floret lamps bloom from the cherry blossom-pink walls, and meringue-shaped ceiling lamps soften the down lighting.

Condesa DF

For the Condesa DF, Mahdavi harvested fragrant woods, smooth stones and hand-forged metals to transform a crumbling colonial-style landmark into a lush oasis of contemporary chic. Elements of the natural world loom large throughout the 40-room hotel; the grainy textures of the shimmering white walls mimic the crystalline sands of Mexico’s Caribbean coastline, while the Condesa’s signature turquoise accents are true to the desert gemstone after which the color was named.

Condesa DF was conceived around a living courtyard, where a vast swath of sunlight is channeled into the property’s inner core and the public spaces flow between indoor and outdoor, giving the hotel a real sense of the traditional hacienda. Back-to-back round sofas furnish the terrace around white enameled Bishops, specially designed for this project.

Located in the stylish Condesa neighborhood and infused with the spirit of its bohemian surroundings, the Condesa DF quickly became an anchor for the neighborhood and for the city’s artistic intelligentsia.

I Love Paris by Guy Martin

The opening of the 100-seat restaurant and bar I Love Paris by Michelin-starred chef Guy Martin at Charles de Gaulle consisted of the first fine dining enterprise in the busy Paris airport. Mahdavi fused oval and circular shapes using velvet, leather, stone and brass to shroud this modern restaurant in the wonder of Paris with her own interpretation of the Palais Royal.

The space is distributed into two main areas adapted to the needs and paces of the passengers: a bar located in the middle and a lounge on the left. For the main lighting in the bar area, Mahdavi selected the Cirio Circular lamp by Antoni Arola with brass shades, a lighting system inspired by the grand luminaires in the Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul that creates splendid compositional interplays and gives the space an uplifting feel.

The warm, delicate and epicurean interlude at the heart of terminal 2E was named Best Airport Restaurant in the World (Fab Awards 2016).

Le Réfectoire

The Réfectoire in Arles is at the heart of the Luma Foundation, a former industrial manufacturing plant converted to an artistic, environmental and social center which is laying the foundations for a new future under Maja Hoffman’s direction.

In this 30-foot-high warehouse, Mahdavi has opted for long and diagonally polychrome tables that lead outside, as if to perpetuate the space chromatically. The tables’ solar range of yellows and oranges are dear to the south of France and complement the convivial meals cooked from organic and seasonal produce.

Hôtel du Cloître

Occupying a centuries-old townhouse nestled amid the winding alleys of Arles in the south of France, and in the continuity of her projects with Maja Hoffmann, Mahdavi imagined the Hôtel du Cloître, adjacent to the cloister of St. Trophime, as a renewed hotel experience.

The 20-bedroom boutique hotel is illuminated by Mahdavi’s bold color palette, which channels the vivid hues of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. Splashes of azure blue, cadmium yellow and chrome orange are complemented by a playful collection of bespoke and vintage furniture, and exquisitely crafted decorative objects that invigorate the building’s austere architectural heritage with a painterly flair infusing the hotel with storied charm.

Mahdavi approached the historic building, which traces its origins to the 13th century, with both respect and playfulness. High ceilings, mosaic floors and exposed masonry sections denote the hotel’s historic setting, while the bold colors of the limewashed walls, upholstery, and curtain fabrics swathe the interiors with a sense of delight. It is this combination of traditional craftsmanship and bold design gestures that encapsulates the passionate temperament of Arles and the rural beauty of Provence.

This project was about tying together all the historical elements, from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, to create a coherent and fresh identity.

Townhouse

This first hotel designed by Mahdavi, for hotelier and restaurateur Jonathan Morr, is a manifesto. Conceived as a refreshing and inviting beach house, the intensity of the colors – the radiance of the red and baby blue, even the beige – gives the Miami Beach hotel an atmosphere of ‘endless summer.’

The mood is light and fresh, the present aesthetic principles transcend fashion and seasons, making this pop 80-bedroom Eden the first charming boutique hotel in the world. The terrace furnished with waterbeds and the ‘Bond Street’ restaurant are a signature, announcing Mahdavi’s principles and style.

Homo Faber

Homo Faber (i.e., human being capable of crafting things) is an expression that was first coined during the Renaissance; it captures and celebrates the infinite creativity of human beings. In this first major cultural exhibition dedicated to European craftsmanship, Mahdavi celebrates the know-hows that bind the hand, the mind, the heart and the eye together.

With the invitation of the Michelangelo Foundation, an international non-profit organization based in Geneva and set up to celebrate and preserve master craftsmanship around the world and strengthen its connection to design, she conceives two contemporary follies, ‘Henri Rousseau Forever’ and ‘Merry-Go-Round’ – two exhilarating rooms to reveal her signature materials, such as rattan, ceramic and polychrome velvets.

Pierre Frey

With the ‘True Velvet’ collection, velvet enters another dimension, a more enveloping and joyful one, just like everything that Mahdavi appreciates. In an infinite exchange of ultra-contemporary symmetries, more than 80 tones interact with each other, from the most subtle to the most saturated, all carrying light.

The collection is available in three weights corresponding to different qualities of cloth: fine, medium and bold. Two geometric prints of diamonds or stripes complement this radiant palette.

Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades

Created in 2012, Louis Vuitton’s ‘Objets Nomades’ line showcase the brand’s longstanding tradition of crafting original and charming portable pieces of travel furniture, in collaboration with an elite group of international designers. Each limited-edition object or piece of furniture is created as a result of an encounter, a dialogue, an intuition, a shared passion. Together, they comprise a singular collection whose leitmotif is the elegant and elaborate treatment of material taken to its limits.

In a nod to her Irano-Egyptian heritage, Mahdavi created the ‘Talisman’ table, a small, intricately crafted piece inspired by the amulets of nomadic tribes. It features a marquetry top made from no fewer than 112 pieces of leather, smoothly lacquered with a transparent varnish, evoking the iris of a benevolent eye.

Conceived like a large book, with 10 leather-lined wooden panels opening around a central hinge, the ‘Talisman’ table is both a symbol of the East and a nomadic object, in the sense that it can be moved around in function of one’s desires, journeys. It is, first and foremost, a free object.

Poterie Ravel

The ‘Canvas’ collection is the continuation of a unique collaboration between Mahdavi and Poterie Ravel, produced in a capsule of approximately thirty unique pieces all hand made, numbered, and signed by Mahdavi.

For this new summer solstice, we are invited on a journey from Aubagne, in the heart of Provence, to Paris, through a vivid interplay of color, light and bold cylindrical shapes. The hand-turned vases in white clay and terracotta resemble paintings, as if they were rolled-up canvases. The paint looks as though the artist’s hand was freed from the paintbrush. The ultra-graphic vases themselves almost drift away from their actual function, becoming more like objects that please the senses.

Wonderglass

Inspired by her obsession with flowers, Mahdavi designed two limited edition pieces, for Wonderglass, ‘Clover’ and ‘Pistil,’ each created in a limited edition of 8 units.

‘Clover’ is a chandelier formed of carefully crafted semi-opaque green pulegoso glass balls, which are attached to a black flower-shaped glass base. The surface of the glass features an irregular texture, created through the absorption of small bubbles during the manufacturing process, which gives it an irregular and dynamic texture.

‘Pistil’ incorporates Mahdavi’s iconic flower shape and consists of a transparent tabletop made with pulegoso glass supported by a metal base. The. The intensive and highly skilled process of producing the tabletop from a single piece of handmade cast glass gives the table its unique, rippled surface on the underside. As with real flowers, it is perfectly imperfect.

Bisazza

For her second collaboration with Bisazza, Mahdavi has chosen to transform the classic bathroom into a bubble of color and humor. An antidote to the minimalist hygiene of laboratory white, the three shades of strawberry, pistachio and blueberry celebrate the art of the bath in a joyful way.

With product names mimicking exclamations from graphic novels, the Mahdavi Collection by Bisazza has a frisky and playful side, albeit one paired with a grownup sensibility. The line is infused with a dash of humor: The tub is dubbed ‘Plouf,’ the washbasin ‘Splash,’ and the mirror ‘Wow.’

Executed in Venetian enamel mosaics, Pinstripe patterned wall tiles, with their regimented nod to traditional fabric, supply a counterpoint to the roundness of the individual pieces.

Meriguet-Carrère

Launched in September 2019, the ‘Flowers’ color range created by Mahdavi for Mériguet-Carrère associates imaginary and know-how for which this house, founded in 1966, is the live setting, in the pursuit of the most accurate tones and harmonies.

From the ‘mandarine au lait’ (milky mandarin) to ‘Hilda’ (her grandmother’s name), we encounter through the names of Mahdavi’s chosen colors the sense of humor and poetry that have always been part of her vocabulary – 56 colors all together, as many as a deck of cards, in which Mahdavi reveals her unprecedented color associations.

Monoprix

When Mahdavi joined forces with French retailer Monoprix for its holiday collection, the result was a riot of color, textures, and pattern on pattern.

For her first collaboration with the brand, Mahdavi created over 110 items ranging from complete place settings to candles, from umbrellas to pillows – and more ­– as a true festival of colors and moods which celebrate summer in winter. She even put her own stamp on one quintessentially French item: the shopping caddy every respectable French shopper has in hand àu supermarché.

Carwan Gallery

The result of a journey across Beirut, Istanbul and Paris, Mahdavi’s ‘Landscapes’ is a collection of limited-edition tables, each crafted by hand and suitable for indoor and outdoor use. Commissioned by Carwan Gallery, this project has been produced by the Iznik Foundation in Bursa, Turkey.

The starting point for the collection was the use of Ottoman-style quartz tiles and the exploration of a new approach in the construction of a monumental table that surprises the senses with its reflections and heady colors. The ateliers of the Iznik Foundation, famous for their development of tiles using the heritage of old Ottoman tradition, offered the perfect savoir-faire. The material used for the bisque is composed of 85% pure quartz powder, producing the reflective shine of the product.

The enameled ceramic ‘Landscape’ vases come in a range of dense and vivid colors. Each element and tile depicts the details of an urban and graphic panorama, conveying the notion of a garden. The effervescence of color and texture exchanges with the scale of the craft – the objects become part of a whole and can be considered on their own or as part of a series: golden or monochromatic.

Maison Vervloet

Imagined as ’bubble dreams,’ Mahdavi’s ’Bubbles’ collection embodies the alliance between simplicity and femininity, through the intersection of pure and absolute geometric shapes. Gently perched, like birds on a branch, they transport us with their song.

Émaux de Longwy

Since its debut in 2004, Mahdavi’s wildly popular ‘Bishop’ stool, an enameled ceramic rendition of the chess piece, has been released in a number of special iterations, including a blossoming limited-edition series with Manufacture des Émaux de Longwy, known for its centuries-old Cloisonné enamel technique.

Enameled by hand using the ‘drop by drop’ technique and fired at 750 degrees, the ‘Bishop’ is completely decorated with flowers in two patterns – ‘Apple Blossom’ and ‘Primadonna’ – each produced in an 8-piece limited edition.

Achromia
Carwan Gallery

At Athens’ Carwan Gallery, India Mahdavi explores uncharted territories with a new all-white collection made of marble.

It was, of all things, a magazine article that sparked the idea. In 2018, The New Yorker published a sprawling report on current research being done on ruins unearthed from Greek and Roman archaeological sites, concluding that the milky white marble forms that have come to define antiquity are not what they seem. That at the time of their creation, they were lavishly painted – buildings were awash in vibrant decorative motifs while human forms came with brightly patterned clothing and had many shades of pigmented skin – but the colorant had disintegrated and eroded over time, leaving the stark white forms we now associate with Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture. Thousands of years ago the built environment was not really homogeneously white, they concluded, but in fact, drenched in color.

For the exhibition, Mahdavi rendered the pieces solely in white marble. Among them are the three-tiered ‘Bishop’ stool, which she regularly reinvents in new colorways and patterns, the two-piece asymmetric ‘Alber’ table, originally designed for late fashion designer Alber Elbaz, and two versions of the ‘Diagonale’ table, a long dining table and smaller circular version, which was originally produced in pigmented ceramic. In addition to the material makeover, she added diagonal fluting to the edges of each piece as a nod to traditional Greek columns. Mahdavi and her team employed a 3D printer to build 1:1 scale models in her Paris studio. Though the forms were pulled from her own archive, the novel material required a total rehashing of proportion and scale.

The pieces were crafted in Pentelic marble quarried from the slopes of Mount Pentelikon just outside the city, the very same stone used to build the Parthenon.

India Mahdavi

This long-overdue, eponymous first monograph of India Mahdavi takes us on a retrospective journey through the most emblematic realizations of the world-renowned Paris-based interior designer, internationally praised for her unique sense of color.

Offering an unprecedented perspective on Mahdavi’s creative process, this book highlights a comprehensive array of the inspirational images, drawings, sketches, and models that evolved into some of her most celebrated projects including The Gallery at Sketch in London, Ladurée in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Geneva, as well as Hôtel du Cloître in Arles, and many others. Admired for her color sensibility, this book highlights the depth and breadth of Mahdavi’s talent and the variety of her projects.

This deluxe tome, art directed by Studio Achermann and published by Chronicle, features the tactile, large format book in a bespoke, patterned slipcase, and includes an additional booklet featuring Mahdavi’s photography that captures details, patterns, colors, and more from her travels around the world. Additionally, an extensive interview with Mahdavi by Dr. Javier F. Contreras, dean of the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland, contributes to make this volume an insightful celebration of the first twenty-one years of India Mahdavi’s singular career.

Téhéran

For this publication ‘Portraits de Villes,’ Les éditions be-pôles invited Mahdavi to talk about her native city, Tehran. This book is a tracking shot between urbanization and vestiges, at the border of what has been erased and what is reborn.

It’s a first for the architect, who signs a portfolio of photographs taken between 2012 and 2017 in Tehran. Throughout the photographs that associate memories and snapshots, Mahdavi delivers an intimate vision of a city in which absence and life coincide to give beauty.

Home

With the help of Soline Delos, Mahdavi reveals her great principles and small tips with illustrated photographs and sketches: how to improve a space, increase light, mix colors and materials, and how to make the best out of your interiors.

Over one hundred addresses around the world supplement this book published by Editions Flammarion – an essential guide for all home lovers.