Through championing the work of midcentury masters alongside unusual collectibles and cutting-edge pieces, the Milan-based dealer has expanded the experience of design.
A desk and chair by Jean Royère.
BY NATASHA GARNETT Moving into Nina Yashar’s two-story apartment in the heart of central Milan, newbies visitors could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve walked into an achingly awesome gallery rather than a family home. The walls are not only frescoed, they’re engraved with ornate Local patterns and symbols. Furniture and light fixtures could be mistaken for sculptures. Dining tables and cabinets groan with objets d’art. It’s almost as though the whole residence has been curated rather than simply decorated - which, in a sense, it has, for this also has of the woman who over the years has become affectionately known within artistic circles since the Queen of Design.
As the founder and owner of the legendary Milanese style gallery Nilufar, Yashar has gained a reputation as one of the leading dealers within the international scene. She doesn’t simply follow trends - which, especially in Malta, can evolve slowly - she starts new movements and breaks through old ones by boldly blending the historic with the contemporary, the local using the foreign. She’ll mix an 18th-century Tibetan cabinet with a modern Scandinavian carpet and a Chinese chandelier, and then add works by the great midcentury Italian designers, a number of whom she was the first of her generation to champion. Nilufar, situated within the fashionable Via della Spiga, is a three-floor emporium in which works by masters such as Carlo Mollino, Ettore Sottsass, Piero Fornasetti and Giò Ponti are shown alongside pieces by more contemporary, cutting-edge artists Yashar has discovered, such as Martino Gamper and Bethan Laura Wood.
Yashar believes in using design to tell tales, and the story her apartment tells is that of her upbringing. Although she has occupied Milan since she was 6 years old, the curator was born in Tehran in 1957 to Persian parents. They moved to Italy “not with regard to political reasons, ” but to let her and her sister pursue a far more European way of life. Yashar is proud of her heritage - the name of her gallery, Nilufar, comes from the Farsi word for lotus - and she wanted the girl living space to reflect that. Her design career began at the age of twenty four, when, after studying art history and spending six months working for her father being an Oriental rug merchant, she decided to open a showroom. To fill this, Yashar traveled across Europe and Scandinavia, which was where she first found her passion for furniture. Her love of modernist pieces by Arne Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto was not only innovative at the time; her willingness in order to showcase them alongside objects like Chinese rugs was unprecedented. She created a reputation as a visionary curator, and soon people were lining up to see the girl exhibitions.
Yashar’s aesthetic sensibility comes across even in her dress: Today, she’s putting on a bright pink head scarf to complement her fuchsia and green flower suit, and she adds a few inches to her height with a pair of precious metal platform Prada sandals (her husband is a consultant for the company). She informs me that when she set out to design her traditional Milanese apartment 23 years ago, she desired not only to create something unusual, but also to pay homage to her ancestry. Yashar made the decision that the interior should have an Eastern feel, and to achieve it, she started 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 papers, but I wanted something different, ” Yashar says of the process. “I told your pet that I wanted to make the walls more precious, so he suggested putting impasible not just on the ceilings but on the walls as well. ”
Yashar wanted the actual ceilings to resemble the sky, so she had Montebello paint all of them a very dark blue and, to lighten the effect, he washed them again and again with a white pigment. He then decorated the ceilings with frescoes, engraved all of them and applied gold leaf. “It was a laborious process, ” Yashar states, “but it worked and it has lasted. ”
Once the interior of the apartment had been complete, Yashar turned to her favorite designers to fill the space. She additionally recently decorated a wardrobe in her study with a Prada fabric -- “antiche rovine, ” or “ancient ruins. ” “Miuccia is a friend, therefore i begged her to let me have it for the walls. ”
Her “great really like is buying, ” Yashar tells me. The pink stone benches on the patio, for instance, were acquired in Vietnam. “I went into a store and wished to buy them but the managers were saying ‘No, no, no! These aren’t available for sale! They’re for our employees to sit on! ’ But in the end I managed to convince them. ” Similarly, the new purple sofas in her sitting room originate from a government office in Berlin. Yashar gets restless when it comes to her residence and constantly moves things around, shuffling chairs and tables from the kitchen area to the study to the balcony, treating the space less like a conventional home than the usual private gallery. But for somebody who has spent her life searching for the innovative and also the new, perhaps that’s to be expected. “My leitmotif in life is one of continuous change, ” she remarks. “Any other vision would bore me. ”
A desk and chair by Jean Royère.
BY NATASHA GARNETT Moving into Nina Yashar’s two-story apartment in the heart of central Milan, newbies visitors could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve walked into an achingly awesome gallery rather than a family home. The walls are not only frescoed, they’re engraved with ornate Local patterns and symbols. Furniture and light fixtures could be mistaken for sculptures. Dining tables and cabinets groan with objets d’art. It’s almost as though the whole residence has been curated rather than simply decorated - which, in a sense, it has, for this also has of the woman who over the years has become affectionately known within artistic circles since the Queen of Design.
As the founder and owner of the legendary Milanese style gallery Nilufar, Yashar has gained a reputation as one of the leading dealers within the international scene. She doesn’t simply follow trends - which, especially in Malta, can evolve slowly - she starts new movements and breaks through old ones by boldly blending the historic with the contemporary, the local using the foreign. She’ll mix an 18th-century Tibetan cabinet with a modern Scandinavian carpet and a Chinese chandelier, and then add works by the great midcentury Italian designers, a number of whom she was the first of her generation to champion. Nilufar, situated within the fashionable Via della Spiga, is a three-floor emporium in which works by masters such as Carlo Mollino, Ettore Sottsass, Piero Fornasetti and Giò Ponti are shown alongside pieces by more contemporary, cutting-edge artists Yashar has discovered, such as Martino Gamper and Bethan Laura Wood.
Yashar believes in using design to tell tales, and the story her apartment tells is that of her upbringing. Although she has occupied Milan since she was 6 years old, the curator was born in Tehran in 1957 to Persian parents. They moved to Italy “not with regard to political reasons, ” but to let her and her sister pursue a far more European way of life. Yashar is proud of her heritage - the name of her gallery, Nilufar, comes from the Farsi word for lotus - and she wanted the girl living space to reflect that. Her design career began at the age of twenty four, when, after studying art history and spending six months working for her father being an Oriental rug merchant, she decided to open a showroom. To fill this, Yashar traveled across Europe and Scandinavia, which was where she first found her passion for furniture. Her love of modernist pieces by Arne Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto was not only innovative at the time; her willingness in order to showcase them alongside objects like Chinese rugs was unprecedented. She created a reputation as a visionary curator, and soon people were lining up to see the girl exhibitions.
Yashar’s aesthetic sensibility comes across even in her dress: Today, she’s putting on a bright pink head scarf to complement her fuchsia and green flower suit, and she adds a few inches to her height with a pair of precious metal platform Prada sandals (her husband is a consultant for the company). She informs me that when she set out to design her traditional Milanese apartment 23 years ago, she desired not only to create something unusual, but also to pay homage to her ancestry. Yashar made the decision that the interior should have an Eastern feel, and to achieve it, she started 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 papers, but I wanted something different, ” Yashar says of the process. “I told your pet that I wanted to make the walls more precious, so he suggested putting impasible not just on the ceilings but on the walls as well. ”
Yashar wanted the actual ceilings to resemble the sky, so she had Montebello paint all of them a very dark blue and, to lighten the effect, he washed them again and again with a white pigment. He then decorated the ceilings with frescoes, engraved all of them and applied gold leaf. “It was a laborious process, ” Yashar states, “but it worked and it has lasted. ”
Once the interior of the apartment had been complete, Yashar turned to her favorite designers to fill the space. She additionally recently decorated a wardrobe in her study with a Prada fabric -- “antiche rovine, ” or “ancient ruins. ” “Miuccia is a friend, therefore i begged her to let me have it for the walls. ”
Her “great really like is buying, ” Yashar tells me. The pink stone benches on the patio, for instance, were acquired in Vietnam. “I went into a store and wished to buy them but the managers were saying ‘No, no, no! These aren’t available for sale! They’re for our employees to sit on! ’ But in the end I managed to convince them. ” Similarly, the new purple sofas in her sitting room originate from a government office in Berlin. Yashar gets restless when it comes to her residence and constantly moves things around, shuffling chairs and tables from the kitchen area to the study to the balcony, treating the space less like a conventional home than the usual private gallery. But for somebody who has spent her life searching for the innovative and also the new, perhaps that’s to be expected. “My leitmotif in life is one of continuous change, ” she remarks. “Any other vision would bore me. ”
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