An ode to the power of colour, India Mahdavi’s first monograph shines the spotlight on the designer’s trendsetting interiors and signature pieces

India Mahdavi’s first monograph, art-directed by Studio Achermann and published by Chronicle Books, comes with a suitably colourful slipcase. Image © courtesy India Mahavi

Paris-based designer India Mahdavi is best known for her way with colour: from Ladurée’s boutiques in various shades of acid and deep greens to the all-pink Gallery restaurant at Sketch (said to be the most Instagrammed interior in London, it helped create the trend for millennial pink), Mahdavi has a gift for eye-popping palettes. Now, a new monograph, released during Milan Design Week, explores her vibrant canon.

India Mahdavi: the monograph

The monograph is filled with project photographs, such as this interior of Ladurée Beverly Hills, 2017 (top, photography: Sam Frost, courtesy India Mahdavi) as well as preparatory work, such as these sketches for the project (above, © Studio India Mahdavi, courtesy India Mahdavi)

It’s 20 years since Mahdavi founded her studio, so this long-overdue publication is packed with an entire career’s worth of creations. And we’re lucky the book has finally been published: it seems only the recent enforced lockdown allowed the designer the time to complete it.

Mahdavi, who trained at Paris’ Beaux-Arts and worked for Christian Liaigre before setting up her own studio after the birth of her son, has barely stopped for two decades, as this retrospective makes clear.

There have been hotel designs in Mexico and Monte-Carlo, private cinemas and residences, and restaurants in New York and Paris. She’s also opened three spaces of her own – a showroom, a boutique and a gallery – near her office on Rue Las Cases, from where she has launched designs including elegant blown-glass lamps, Mickey-shaped rattan masks, and her iconic ‘Bishop’ stools, the last now part of the collection of Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris.

‘If there is a common denominator to all my projects, it is the necessity of creating a sense of joy, a joie de vivre that I like to convey by using the primary colours of my emotions’ – India Mahdavi

Making colours sing is only part of Mahdavi’s approach: ‘I have always practised interior design at the crossroads of other disciplines, such as scenography, film, decor, furniture, and product design, exploring as many opportunities that were given to me to design, decorate, remodel, or reveal a space, creating new experiences, embellishing life,’ she writes in the book’s introduction.