With Paris in the spotlight as the host of this year's Olympic games, people planning on visiting this summer know that the city is likely to be at its most crowded. But what tucked-away gems are there to discover outside of the busy rooms of the Louvre and the poetic, yet overly-traveled cobblestone alleys of Montmartre? We asked our favorite Paris-based designers to take us on a tour across the city to the places that feel most like home to them.
There is a sense of wonder and an unspoiled curiousness to the fantastical spaces Iranian-French architect and designer India Mahdavi is known for. Born in Tehran in 1962, the vivid iconography of Persia's centuries-spanning artistic heritage is impressed on her DNA. From a young age, color became the filter through which Mahdavi deciphered the world around her — be it the reality of her early Massachusetts upbringing (populated by the adventures of her favorite cartoon characters), her German and French Riviera years, or her experience of Paris as an architecture student at École des Beaux Arts in the 1980s.
