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.
Match Point, by Crosby Studios founder Harry Nuriev, was an all-room installation at Project Room, India Mahdavi’s Paris gallery that she programs with collaborative temporary exhibitions, in aluminum paneling, linoleum flooring, lamé curtains, and a custom table and paddles that ran during the 2024 Summer Olympics.