By championing the work of midcentury masters alongside unusual antiques and cutting-edge pieces, the Milan-based dealer has redefined the experience of design.
Stepping into Nina Yashar’s two-story apartment in the heart of central Milan, first-time visitors could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve walked into an achingly cool gallery rather than a family home. The walls are not only frescoed, 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 — which, especially in Italy, can evolve slowly — 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. Nilufar, situated on the fashionable Via della Spiga, is a three-floor emporium in which works by masters like Carlo Mollino, Ettore Sottsass, Piero Fornasetti and Giò Ponti are displayed 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 stories, and the story her apartment tells is that of her upbringing. Although she has lived in Milan since she was 6 years old, the curator was born in Tehran in 1957 to Persian parents. They moved to Italy “not for political reasons,” but to let her and her sister pursue a 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 her living space to reflect that. Her design career began at the age of 24, when, after studying art history and spending six months working for her father as an Oriental rug merchant, she decided to open a showroom. To fill it, 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’s aesthetic sensibility comes across even in her dress: Today, she’s wearing a bright pink head scarf to complement her fuchsia and green floral suit, and she adds a few inches to her height with a pair of gold platform Prada sandals (her husband is a consultant for the company). She tells me that when she set out to design her traditional Milanese apartment 23 years ago, she wanted not only to create something unusual, but also to pay homage to her ancestry. 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.”
Yashar wanted the ceilings to resemble the sky, so she had Montebello paint them a very dark blue and, to lighten the effect, he washed them over and over again with a white pigment. He then decorated the ceilings with frescoes, engraved them and applied gold leaf. “It was a laborious process,” Yashar says, “but it worked and it has lasted.”
Once the interior of the apartment was complete, Yashar turned to her favorite designers to fill the space. She also recently decorated a wardrobe in her study with a Prada fabric — “antiche rovine,” or “ancient ruins.” “Miuccia is a friend, so I begged her to let me have it for the walls.”
Her “great love is buying,” Yashar tells me. The pink stone benches on the terrace, for instance, were acquired in Vietnam. “I went into a store and wanted to buy them but the managers were saying ‘No, no, no! These aren’t for sale! They’re for our employees to sit on!’ But in the end I managed to persuade them.” Similarly, the new purple sofas in her sitting room come from a government office in Berlin. Yashar gets restless when it comes to her apartment and constantly moves things around, shuffling chairs and tables from the kitchen to the study to the balcony, treating the space less like a conventional home than a private gallery. But for somebody who has spent her life searching for the innovative and the new, perhaps that’s to be expected. “My leitmotif in life is one of constant change,” she remarks. “Any other vision would bore me.”
