'Everyone Uses Color Now. Not Everyone Uses It With Meaning. What Interests Me More Is Friction. Imperfection.' – India Mahdavi Reveals the Philosophy Behind Her Joyful Interiors

There are designers who create rooms, and there are designers who create feelings. India Mahdavi belongs firmly in the latter camp. Over the past two decades, the architect and designer has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary interiors, celebrated for her fearless use of color and her ability to create spaces that feel both joyful and deeply human. Yet behind the vibrant palettes and instantly recognizable projects lies a more philosophical approach than many realize. For India, color is not decoration but emotion; design is not about style but about shaping experiences.

In this latest installment of our Layered Lives series, India reveals that perhaps this sensitivity comes from a childhood spent moving between countries, cultures, and languages, learning to read the atmosphere of a room before anything else. Or perhaps it stems from a lifelong fascination with cinema, architecture, and the stories spaces can tell. Whatever the source, India's work continues to prove that interiors have the power not only to delight us but to change how we feel.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

India Mahdavi: As far back as I can remember, I always envisioned my future as being linked to an aesthetic world. I would not call it a love of design – that came later, and somewhat by accident. What I had, very early, was an obsession with homes, with interiors as containers of another life. Films were everything to me. They brought a fantasy that felt more real than my own daily existence. I would lose myself in the sets, in the light, in the way a room could hold a mood, a secret, a whole psychology. It was less about design as a discipline and more about spaces as emotional territories. I was, I think, running away from my own everyday life and finding shelter in imagined ones.

Homes & Gardens: Was there a love of design in your family that influenced you growing up?

India Mahdavi: Design was not a subject of interest in my family – not in any explicit sense. What I had instead was movement. A nomadic childhood: eleven moves during my schooling, three languages, three countries. That kind of instability does something to you. You learn to read a room very quickly. You become attuned to atmosphere, to the feeling a place gives you, because you are always arriving somewhere new and trying to understand it.

Homes & Gardens: Were any of your relatives creative, though, and did they inspire you?

India Mahdavi: There was my grandmother – a woman who lived for taste. An art lover who dressed in haute couture, who moved through the world with a kind of intentionality that I absorbed without fully understanding. She never talked about design. She simply lived it. That was my real early education.

Homes & Gardens: Are there any spaces that showed you the possibilities of good design?

India Mahdavi: My imagination was fed by everything that caught my attention – from Tex Avery cartoons on television to the vivid, almost hallucinatory color of mid-1960s America. I was a child who lived inside images.

But if I think of one specific architectural moment, one early frisson, it was the Fondation Maeght in the south of France. Something happened to me there. It was the way art and architecture dissolved into each other, the way the building didn't simply house the work but seemed to breathe with it. It was magical in a way that had nothing to do with grandeur or spectacle – intimate and radical at the same time. That experience planted something in me without my knowing it: this idea that a space could be an emotional act.

Homes & Gardens: When did you first start to think about design as a career?

India Mahdavi: I always wanted to be a filmmaker. I studied architecture instead, precisely to follow Fritz Lang's path – he was an architect before he became a director, and I found that trajectory completely logical. Space, light, set, atmosphere: these felt like the grammar of cinema. But when I finished my studies, I was uncertain. The production timeline in architecture is so long, and the environment at the time was deeply, aggressively misogynistic. I spent a year in New York working at a smaller scale – product design, furniture design, graphic design. And something became clear. I realized that working at the scale of an object, a room, or a hotel could give me the immediacy I craved, the directness of film, without the institutional weight of traditional architecture. It felt like the right language.

Homes & Gardens: What did your own home look like at that time?

India Mahdavi: The late 1990s in design had a particular tyranny – minimalism as a moral position, restraint as virtue. I was never convinced. I wanted warmth, color, memory, the sense that someone had actually lived in a space and brought something of themselves to it. The early work was a series of experiments: not yet a language, but already a refusal.

Homes & Gardens: As your career developed, are there any projects that stand out to you as a turning point?

India Mahdavi: The Pink Room at The Gallery at Sketch in London announced something publicly that I had felt privately for some time – that color could be an architectural decision, not a decorative one, and that joy was a serious ambition.

Homes & Gardens: And did you meet anyone along the way who was particularly inspiring to you?

India Mahdavi: There was my encounter with Maja Hoffmann, a relationship and collaboration that has now lasted for more than eighteen years. Working with someone who thinks with that level of cultural rigor and personal conviction changes you. It raises the stakes in the best possible way.

More recently, POMO – the contemporary art museum in Trondheim, Norway – has been a kind of reckoning. It is my first major institutional project, and one where I had to articulate very precisely what my contribution was. What I brought was the sensibility of hospitality, applied to a museum. I focused on the in-between spaces: the corridors, the thresholds, the moments of transition between galleries. Those are the spaces that are usually forgotten. I wanted them to be experienced – to create a different quality of presence from the exhibition spaces themselves. Using color, ornament, and material in a more radical, more consequential way. That is where the work became truly mine.

Homes & Gardens: Looking at the work you create now, how has your style evolved?

India Mahdavi: My work has evolved alongside the profession, which has itself changed enormously since I founded my studio around the year 2000. Throughout that time, I have developed my own language, my own grammar. But over the years it has become more precise – and paradoxically more complex at the same time. The early work was intuitive. The current work is intuitive and considered. I know now why I make the choices I make. I can defend them, place them within a larger way of thinking. And that confidence allows me to take more risks – to use color, ornament, and material in ways that are more radical, less decorative. More consequential. What I would not do now is work from the surface inward. Form and color are consequences, not starting points.

Homes & Gardens: When starting a new project, what's the very first thing you look for or ask that helps unlock the direction of the design?

India Mahdavi: I try to define the question I want to answer – not the solution, the question. That is often the most difficult part of the entire process. If you define the question well, the design almost follows. If you rush to answers, you produce something correct but not alive. I call this Phase Zero: the moment of listening, of reading a place, a client, a brief – against its grain as much as with it. What is really being asked here? What is missing? What could this place become that it doesn't yet know it is? Only when I can formulate that question precisely do I feel ready to begin.

Homes & Gardens: You've often said that color is a language. What are you trying to communicate with it?

India Mahdavi: Color is a consequence – that is the first thing to understand. I never begin with a palette. I begin with an emotion, an intention, a question, and the color arrives as the answer. When I used pink at Sketch, I was not thinking about pink. I was thinking about a particular kind of warmth, of softness without sentimentality, of femininity without cliché. Pink imposed itself as the only honest response to that thinking. And then it took me a long time – much longer than people imagine – to find the exact pink, because I was not looking for a color. I was looking for the essence of an emotion. This is what color communicates when it is used well: not a mood in the superficial sense, but a position. A conviction about what a space is for, and what it should make you feel.

Homes & Gardens: Do you think color is becoming more important in uncertain times?

India Mahdavi: Color is very visible and very photogenic – and in a world where the image has become so dominant, that has given it an almost inflationary quality. Everyone uses color now. Not everyone uses it with meaning. What interests me more is friction. Imperfection. The idea that a color can disturb slightly before it seduces. I am not interested in color that simply pleases – I am interested in color that provokes a second look, that creates a slight dissonance before resolving into something right. In difficult times, color should not offer false comfort. It should offer the kind of aliveness that reminds you that you are here.

Homes & Gardens: How do you know when you've found the right color for a project?

India Mahdavi: It is entirely instinctive – and yet also very precise. I know, deep down, which color belongs and which does not. I often feel that colors impose themselves on me, and that I am only their medium. The work is not choosing. The work is listening closely enough to hear what the space is asking for.

Homes & Gardens: What do you think color can do to a person's emotions?

India Mahdavi: Color brings a vibration, a particular quality of light that is not physical but psychological. It can produce joy, unease, nostalgia, desire – sometimes several at once. At its most powerful, it doesn't produce a single emotion but an openness to feeling. It makes you more present in a room.

Homes & Gardens: Talking of color, the Rosary headboard you designed for Bolzan – how did you come up with that palette?

India Mahdavi: For the Rosary headboard, it was less about color choice than about meaning. I wanted to integrate something into a bedroom that could sanctify it. The bed is the center of your life in a way we rarely acknowledge: it is where you dream, where you are most vulnerable, where the most extraordinary things happen to you. It deserves reverence. The ceramic beads are there as a kind of offering – a private ritual object. And because every combination can be customized, every bed is different. Every dream is unique.

Homes & Gardens: Your work is often described as joyful. Do you consciously set out to create happiness?

India Mahdavi: I am always fighting my own melancholia. Joy is not something that comes naturally to me – it is something I pursue, something I build. This is precisely why I take it seriously as a design intention. Joy, for me, is not decoration. It is an act of resistance.

Homes & Gardens: Is joy an undervalued quality in design?

India Mahdavi: Yes, I think joy has long been undervalued in design. For too long, seriousness meant severity. Ornament was crime, color was frivolity. I never believed that. Today, when the future offers so little reassurance, joy becomes not just a value but a necessity. It is a serious matter to make someone feel – even briefly – that the world is bearable and beautiful.

Homes & Gardens: Can a space change a person's mood? What makes a room feel optimistic?

India Mahdavi: Of course, a space changes your mood – the question is whether it does so consciously or by default. Most spaces change moods accidentally, through neglect or compromise. A room feels optimistic when it has been made with intention – when the proportions are generous, when the light is considered, when there is something unexpected that delights rather than disturbs. When you feel that someone thought about you before you arrived.

Homes & Gardens: Do you think designers have a responsibility to create spaces that make people feel better?

India Mahdavi: That is what I have been trying to do for twenty-five years. When someone enters a space I have designed, I want them to become, for a moment, the actor in their own life – not a spectator. A moment of presence, of awareness, where joy is not something that happens to you but something you inhabit. Those moments nourish your memory long after you have left. That, for me, is what design is for. The responsibility is real, and I take it seriously.

Homes & Gardens: So what makes people want to stay longer in a room?

India Mahdavi: I think of comfort in three distinct ways: physical comfort, visual comfort, and emotional comfort. Physical comfort is the most obvious – scale, proportion, the quality of a seat. Visual comfort is subtler: the sense that wherever your eye lands, there is something worth resting on, without noise or aggression. And emotional comfort is the deepest – the feeling that this room knows you are there. That it was made with a human being in mind. Achieve all three simultaneously, and there is simply no reason to leave.

Homes & Gardens: Lastly, what does the word 'home' mean to you now?

India Mahdavi: Home is where my soul recognizes itself. I say this having moved eleven times as a child, having lived in several countries, having never taken rootedness for granted. My home in Arles – which is also my archive, my workspace, the place where my past and my work coexist – means something very particular to me. It is not just a dwelling. It is a kind of proof that I exist, that I have accumulated something, that I am somewhere. Home is continuity. And for someone who grew up without it, that is everything.

Listening to India Mahdavi speak, it becomes clear that her work is not really about color at all. Rather, color is simply one of the tools she uses to create something more profound: presence. Whether designing a museum, a hotel, a piece of furniture, or a private home, her ambition remains remarkably consistent – to create spaces that make people feel more alive, more connected, and more aware of themselves. In an age when so much design is consumed through a screen, that emphasis on emotion feels especially relevant. For India, beauty is never the end goal; it is the gateway to something deeper.

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