If you have a large commercial area you want to fill with a homogenous international bar or restaurant for the sole purpose of making money, don't call India Mahdavi. She's been there, bought the T-shirt and now it's time to move on. The designer is in the enviable position of being able to cherry-pick her projects, and for now she's looking to work only on spaces that will prove fulfilling in some way, not necessarily monetarily.
'I'm trying to go in a direction where I feel more comfortable, which is to work on a smaller scale,' she says in her studio-cum-showroom in Paris' elegant 7th arrondissement. 'The projects that people have proposed in Shanghai are much bigger, commercial jobs that I'm not really interested in, such as huge restaurants and money makers. I'm into trying to make a difference to a space that's not just decoration. There are a lot of decoration jobs out there, and the danger is you become just a name.'
An architect, designer and stylist, Mahdavi, who was raised by her Persian father and half-Egyptian, half-English mother, spent her youth in 11 countries before attending Paris' Ecole de Beaux Arts and landing a job with Christian Liaigre. Among her signature furniture pieces is the Bishop - a three-tiered stool that wouldn't look out of place on a giant chessboard. With both private and public projects in New York, Mexico and London under her belt, she's best known in Hong Kong for her work on Dragon-i - the restaurant/club that spills out onto the public mezzanine area at the base of The Centrium on Wyndham Street.
'On that terrace there's one big cage with all the birds in. We were supposed to have maybe four of those, but even bigger and I wanted people to have dinner in the cages,' she says. 'There's something quite sexy, quite conducive about that and all these surrounding buildings are like cages too. But we were authorised to have just one cage, which the birds went in. That's why I hung up all the little cages.'
That was in 2002, and since then Mahdavi has been working on projects that, while still commercial in nature, are those with which she can identify - spaces that exude a vibe or, as she puts it, have something to say. Having worked on the restoration of the historic Connaught Hotel in London, she has just finished the refurbishment of the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel in Monaco. The seafront icon, built in 1929, has played host to Hollywood luminaries such as Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, and is a favourite hangout of the principality's ruling Grimaldi family. Because of the building's heritage, any dramatic changes had the potential to be controversial. Mahdavi drew on the romance and feel of French cafe society to produce an interior and exterior that puts a modern twist on Art Deco.
'One of the challenges I had was to paint the facade in terracotta red. We had it in our minds to paint it white, [but] it would have looked like a big ship on the water,' she says.
'We didn't know exactly which colour it was [originally] because we only have black-and-white photos. You could tell it was dark, but not exactly which colour. Suddenly, it was the talk of the town: 'My God, the building is red!''