The walls are not only frescoes, they’re engraved with ornate Persian patterns and symbols. Furniture and light fixtures could be mistaken for sculptures. Tables and cabinets groan with objets d’art. It’s almost as though the whole apartment has been curated rather than simply decorated — which, in a sense, it has, for this is the home of the woman who over the years has become affectionately known within artistic circles as the Queen of Design.
As the founder and owner of the legendary Milanese design gallery Nilufar, Yashar has gained a reputation as one of the leading dealers on the international scene. She doesn’t simply follow trends, she starts new movements and breaks from old ones by boldly blending the historic with the contemporary, the local with the foreign. She’ll mix an 18th-century Tibetan cabinet with a modern Scandinavian rug and a Chinese chandelier, and then add works by the great midcentury Italian designers, several of whom she was the first of her generation to champion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0ScFLkwtk4
Yashar believes in using design to tell stories, and the story her apartment tells is that of her upbringing. Yashar is proud of her heritage and wanted her living space to reflect that. Yashar traveled across Europe and Scandinavia, which was where she first discovered her passion for furniture. Her love of modernist pieces by Arne Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto was not only innovative at the time; her willingness to showcase them alongside objects like Chinese rugs was unprecedented. She developed a reputation as a visionary curator, and soon people were lining up to see her exhibitions.
Yashar decided that the interior should have an Eastern feel, and to achieve it, she began collaborating with the Italian jewelry designer Giancarlo Montebello.
“The fashion in the late ’80s, early ’90s in Italy was to cover walls with fabric or paper, but I wanted something different,” Yashar says of the process. “I told him that I wanted to make the walls more precious, so he suggested putting fresco not just on the ceilings but on the walls as well.”
Once the interior of the apartment was complete, Yashar turned to her favorite designers to fill the space.
