Magic carpets: a wild ride in the home of gallerist Nina Yashar

The duplex she shares with her husband, Angelo, is just that. The daughter of carpet merchants who moved to Milan from Tehran when she was a small child, Yashar started in the family business before discovering classic midcentury furniture design in her early 20s. The combination of these influences became her signature at the gallery she established in 1979, and at her home.

“I started with carpets, but then when I started with furniture, I realised how important carpets were,” she says over coffee, cigarettes and a silver tray of dark chocolate at her famous gallery in Viale Lancetti. “The same space with and without a carpet is completely a different space and atmosphere. For me, carpets are imaginary rooms without walls. A room without a carpet – caput.”

Situated in desirable Città Studi, Yashar’s home was designed in 1990 by her mentor, GianCarlo Montebello, a jewellery designer. “It was the 1990s in Milano and all the homes of my clients were decorated with precious fabric on the walls, reflecting the period of Renzo Mongiardino, Filippo Perego, Nicolò Castellini. I said to myself, ‘I don’t want anything like this! What to do? Who to ask?’”

Luckily, Yashar met Montebello through a chance encounter with “a little sphere covered in gold leaf on a column” in a client’s home. She asked to be introduced to the brains behind this “strange idea”. “He was a very special jewellery designer, because his approach was to study your soul,” explains Yashar. “I knew he would create something very personal, interpreting my Persian background in the columns and the colours, creating something unique for me.”

The lengthy restoration saw dark rooms with low ceilings transformed into an open-plan space complete with handpainted frescoes. Yashar had to be patient, living at the time on the upstairs floor and pregnant with her daughter Lavinia. “My attitude has always been to choose the more difficult route to arrive to beauty. I wanted something that was unique and no one else could have done it – it was a long process,” she laughs.

“I remember coming down from my room one day and seeing the living room ceiling completely dark blue. Montebello was very sensitive, so I didn’t say anything, but later he added five more layers of blue and white in order to obtain the kind of transparency you see in the sky and then he introduced a gold leaf band and little stars to remind me of my origins.”

Choosing the pieces to put in it afterwards “took time and it wasn’t so easy,” says Yashar. “But I am lucky, because my husband follows my taste.” Among her favourite pieces are the two Gio Ponti consoles she sourced from the original foyer of the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome and the 12 red chairs by Carlo Mollino from the Lutrario discotheque in Turin. These surround an Arne Jacobsen – “elliptic not oval” – table that Yashar made bigger by adding a wooden band around its edges. “A great idea I copied from a vintage table of Osvaldo Borsani,” the Italian architect.

She also adapted her beloved red sofa. “I’ve always had a problem choosing sofas. I didn’t want an industrial sofa, so one day I bought one from Promemoria, but then didn’t like it being curved, so I said to my upholstery man, ‘We are going to change the back and make it straight.’ Then I loved it.”

The other seating in the space is a vintage modular sequence that once lived in an embassy in Berlin. “My taste in furniture is not very functional, so if I like something and it’s not functional, I don’t mind,” she says. “I prefer the beauty to the comfort.”

Other furniture in the space reads like a rollcall of the most sought-after designers of the moment – see the Louis Poulsen artichoke lamp, vintage FontanaArte lights, Charlotte Perriand sideboards, and Nanda Vigo’s shaggy Due Più chair.

Meanwhile, artworks are, like the rest of the apartment, an eccentric mix of personal preference. “I buy what I like, I’m not an art dealer, that’s a different job.” Her collection comprises pieces from friends and protégées including artist Gió Marconi, designer Bethan Laura Wood, conceptual artist Carsten Höller, American artist Roni Horn and video artist Grazia Toderi.

The upper floor – comprising the couple’s bedroom, en-suite bathroom and dressing room – is Yashar’s favourite part of the house. The dressing room is particularly close to her heart. The walls were reupholstered in fabric from the Prada archives, fabric that Yashar convinced her close friend Miuccia Prada to allow her to use in a Paris pop-up and then reused here. Prada’s verdict when she saw the room? “She loves.”

If Yashar’s home is a hit now, it once divided opinion. “To be honest, in the 1990s, when all the galleries were white boxes, my gallerist friends thought it was messy,” she says. “Now the same people come and they say, ‘It’s fantastic, it is timeless!’ It’s true that it is as modern now as it was before.”

These days, Yashar’s time is spent with resolute informality, with family and friends enjoying TV dinners on white Arne Jacobsen tables (“People really love the conviviality of that”). In the summer months, they sit out on one of the five terraces designed by Montebello, enjoying the views of Milan’s skyline, and home-cooked dishes and glasses of champagne.

“Everyone who has come into our home feels very relaxed and that was Montebello’s philosophy; he knew very well how the energy in a house works as well as the significance of every colour, so everything is connected. This is a joyful place I like to share.

“Even if we would like something bigger,” she adds, “me and my husband – my daughter as well – are so attached to it that when we think to change it, we say, no, no, no. For us, this is our temple.

Photographs by Helenio Barbetta