Home Chic, by India Mahdavi, is a guidebook for simple folk. Its’ glossy illustrations and its personalized tips enables us to understand how to use space in a fashionable way without just filling it up with décor. Divided into two main sections: the home guide and the designer’s top design venues across the world. In the last section, Mahdavi’s ‘City Guide’, features her international design fabrics and also enables the reader to tour locations from Beirut to the hot hub of Cape Town.
The books’ pages show up the designer’s selected works, including bedrooms at the Hotel Thoumieux and studded walls at the Paradisio Cinema in Paris. The difference between this book and others is that it enables you to use it as a guide , providing you with things to keep your eyes peeled for, illustrated by images of private homes she has worked on as well as high profile spots like the Coburg bar at the Connaught Hotel in London and the Café Germaine in Paris. Mahdavi’s combination of styles, lush fabrics and materials showcase for us how to achieve her signature style.
A bonus for packing it into your bookcase, is its’ ability to take a sneak peek inside Mahdavi’s world of personal design, a closer look at her own home’s interiors as well as successful works of her contemporary yet comfortable design. The features of Mahdavis’ home – ideal settings with individuality allow us a glimpse at how to avoid a cookie cutter room or look. Inexpensive ideas such as how to assemble photos in frames so that it is appealing to the eye, and how to turn junk finds into artsy areas for gallery like looks are also a bonus.
For example in the Hotel Germain, the sculpture of an oversized woman’s torso in the middle of a restaurant – not only adds drama but creates an atmosphere of being in an art gallery while having supper. How can have more drama than that?
