The Gallery at sketch: India Mahdavi's 2022 Conversation Between Colour and Craft
How do you redesign a room whose colour has become part of its public identity? India Mahdavi faced that question when she returned to the Gallery at sketch in London in 2022. Her earlier 2014 interior had wrapped the restaurant in pink. The later project established a warmer yellow setting, with craft and surface taking a more pronounced role alongside the art.
The two versions form distinct chapters in Mahdavi's project archive. Their relationship gives the later room an additional dimension: visitors familiar with the pink interior encounter a space whose proportions remain recognisable while its material atmosphere has changed. The redesign invites attention to what gives a room its identity when its most conspicuous visual feature is reconsidered. [1] [3]
The artwork becomes the starting point
The designer states that the new environment was conceived in relation to Yinka Shonibare's works. Instead of treating the art as a final layer added after furniture and finishes, the project developed a relationship between what hung on the walls and what filled the room. Textile, lighting and colour were brought into the same conversation.
That approach changes the role of decoration. A restaurant is a busy setting for art: people move, talk, dine and look in different directions. The surrounding interior needs enough coherence to support the works without reducing the room to a gallery display. The 2022 scheme can be read as an attempt to establish that balance through a shared material atmosphere. [1]
Craft is present in distinct voices
Mahdavi names Aissa Dione, whose textiles draw on Senegalese handweaving, among the collaborators. Pierre Frey and Rubelli also contributed fabrics, while de Gournay worked on the reflective wallpaper. The familiar Charlotte armchair was revised for the new scheme, its form simplified to give greater prominence to the upholstery.
Each contribution brings a specific practice into the room. Dione's textile work in Senegal, Bressand's collaboration with weavers in Ghana and Shonibare's artistic language have distinct origins and concerns. Their presence gives the interior a cultural specificity that can be traced through individual makers, materials and techniques. Craft becomes legible through these particular relationships. [1] [2]
Light with a visible human hand
Inès Bressand's account of her contribution provides a particularly clear material story. She designed twelve wall lights for the project, made with weavers in Ghana using natural and orange-dyed elephant grass. Their circular shades are approximately 50 centimetres across and 20 centimetres high. Bressand describes them as part of a dialogue with Shonibare's paintings.
The woven surface introduces a different register from the room's reflective wall finish. One catches and returns light; the other gives it a textured edge. That contrast offers a useful way of thinking about warmth in an interior. Warmth need not depend only on selecting a yellow or ochre colour: it can emerge from the relationship between smooth surfaces, fibres, shadows and the evidence of making. [2]
An interior that can change without losing its purpose
The original 2014 Gallery was conceived around another artistic collaboration, with David Shrigley's drawings. The 2022 redesign shows that the strength of the room did not depend solely on preserving its first colour. A consistent ambition could survive a substantial change of palette and material emphasis.
For an interior-design audience, that is the more useful lesson than the succession of photogenic looks. The project demonstrates how a recognisable space can be reconsidered through a new cultural and material brief. Its character is carried by the care given to relationships—between artist and designer, fabric and furniture, light and wall—rather than by one permanent visual formula. [1] [3]
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