The Paris-based designer India Mahdavi to discuss her career at Design Days Dubai

India Mahdavi. Photo by Paolo Roversi

On Monday night, the Paris-based designer India Mahdavi will give a lecture about her work and career as part of Design Days Dubai’s public lecture programme.

Born in Tehran in 1962 to an Iranian father and a Scottish-Egyptian mother, Mahdavi grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Heidelberg, Germany; and Vence, in the South of France.

Despite early dreams of becoming a filmmaker, Mahdavi studied architecture at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before heading to New York, where she studied graphic design at the School of Visual Arts, furniture design at Parsons The New School for Design and industrial design at The Cooper Union in the East Village.

On returning to Paris in the early 1990s, Mahdavi worked with the interior designer Christian Liaigre, eventually becoming his in-house art director, just as Liaigre’s high-contrast, wenge-heavy minimalism was on the rise thanks to his work at the Mercer Hotel in New York City and the Hôtel Montalembert in Paris.

Despite spending seven years in Liaigre’s studio, Mahdavi’s aesthetics could not be more different from those of the grand minimalist. Her work is characterised by a tendency to play with colours, patterns and humour in ways that often challenge conventional notions of “good taste”.

“My work often has an edge to it,” Mahdavi admits. “I take risks sometimes and I fool around in ways that can veer very close to bad taste, but I manage to get away with things in the end because everything I do is always very controlled.”

Mahdavi says that it has taken her a long time to understand all of the influences in her life but now believes that each of the cultures that have helped define her have given her something very different.

“My Persian background and visits to Iran have allowed me to see how people mix so many patterns and colours together but it always manages to work somehow in a very fantastic way.

“Then there is a European influence,” Mahdavi explains. “I live in France which is the world capital of a certain art de vivre and that has added a feeling for luxury and sophistication to my work.”

If her tendency for mixing and matching and the desire for sophistication come from the old world, Mahdavi believes her love of colour stems from the New World and the land of her youth.

“My first memories are from the United States and they are in technicolor,” she explains. “My use of colour comes from that. I need colour and I’m not afraid of it.”

Madhavi is having her work exhibited in two different spaces during Design Days, in Beirut’s Carwan Gallery and Comptoir 102 in Jumeirah. The exhibit at Carwan Gallery will feature a series of specially commissioned planters and vases, Landscape Series 2, that combine two of Mahdavi’s passions, colour and ceramics.

“I wanted to investigate how you can bring vegetation into the home by creating oversize containers that can either be planted or used as flower pots. They create their own architecture,” Mahdavi explains.

Despite having an illustrious list of projects and clients that includes Claridges in London, the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel in Monaco, and the Barclay Prime in Philadelphia, Mahdavi’s work displays humour and openness that is refreshing in the often poe-faced world of contemporary design. She is no snob – and that makes her forthcoming lecture all the more interesting.

“Whoever takes the risk to do certain things – I think that’s great. I try to fight against uniformity and ‘total looks’; I actually think that’s slightly vulgar. I enjoy anything as long as it’s personal. It doesn’t have to be to my taste, just so long as it represents a person’s personality and their vision.”

• India Mahdavi: My Life in Design, 8-9pm, Monday at The Studio during Design Days Dubai

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