Get Active At India Mahdavi’s Paris Installation Inspired By The 2024 Olympics

Rue Las Casas, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, might as well be renamed India Mahdavi Boulevard. The Interior Design Hall of Famer runs three businesses there: her studio, furniture showroom, and Petits Objets shop. In 2020, she expanded her ecosystem to the intersecting Rue de Bellechasse with Project Room, a tidy 430-square-foot gallery where she produces quarterly exhibitions with fellow creatives—past collaborators include Martine Bedin, Chris Wolston, and Les Crafties—that represent a unique nexus of all her interests. “Its scale is intimate enough yet big enough to express a concept,” Mahdavi explains of the modern-day parlor. 

Since she synchronizes the programming with city happenings, the summer show linked to the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics: It was the first all-room installation, called Match Point. When dreaming it up, Mahdavi invited designer Harry Nuriev to flesh out her vision, which resulted in a sporty, silver spectacle of an interactive ping-pong room. “It was Harry’s idea to cover it all in reflective surfaces,” Mahdavi says, “generating a spatial mirroring from inside to out, and vice versa, which was the opposition I wanted to manifest.” She’s currently manifesting Criss Cross, her CC-Tapis carpet collection that is a modern take on tartan and will be shown at Project Room in September.