"She’ll describe a mint green as 'a color that makes me thirsty,' or perceive 'crushed raspberry' where others might see fuchsia."

"'I like to mix and let them insult each other, have an argument,' she has said, of colors, as though they were guests at a dinner party... 'The color of my childhood was strawberry milkshake,' Mahdavi said recently. She was born in 1962, in Tehran, to an Iranian father and an Egyptian mother.... Iran is one of the wellsprings of Mahdavi’s style. 'I love the contrast between the brutality of the city and the softness of this,' she said one day, showing me a photograph she had taken of a bourgeois living room, its coffee table laden with textiles, pattern upon pattern, and bowls of fruit. Iran, to her, is mirror-work, marquetry, turquoise, faded glory. The country also has the advantage of being comparatively lightly touristed, giving her access to a creative person’s most valuable resource: things that not everyone else has seen. 'Iran is inspirational, because the taste is a bit funny,' she told me. 'They’re very free with their associations, and can often go down the wrong route, like kitsch, but that’s where you have the best associations.' [Her client Adel] Abdessemed described Mahdavi’s style as 'a cross between the chromatism of the films of Almodóvar and a form of childlike and joyous orientalism inspired by Iran.' He said, 'She creates a fantastical version of the East that doesn’t exist in the East, a sort of dreamed image.'"

From "India Mahdavi, Virtuoso of Color/The interior designer’s polychromatic dreamlands."