A Visionary in Architecture, Arnaud Behzani

A Visionary in Architecture ARNAUD BEHZADI

| BY HELÉNE RAMACKERS

Striving to never have his products look like yesterday, Arnaud Behzadi’s childhood in Tehran greatly influenced his exceptional architecture of today.

Arnaud, tell us a bit about yourself.

I spent the first 11 years of my life in Tehran. I traveled through a country with an ancient culture without considering how lucky I was. I visited archaeological sites without measuring their strength. I fished sturgeons and emptied these little eggs inside their bellies without knowing the value of what I later came to call caviar. My childhood most certainly influenced my career and the architect I am today.

When and why did you start your firm, Arnaud Behzadi?

I started working on projects in my own name since 2014. It was then that I realized that I had the knowledge and the technicality to assume my own architectural writing, and to discern the elements of history contained in each space, each building, and even each client.

What and who inspires you?

It’s hard to say if someone or something inspires me directly. Nevertheless, I am sure that we are constantly influenced and somewhere we are constantly influencing. However, I can confess to you that during my architecture studies I read Derrida, Foucault, Goetz, Edgar Morin, Paul Ricoeur but also Beaudelaire and that I kept wanting to understand Barragan, Zumthor, Ando, Mathis, Cocteau and many others.

You have worked on a variety of projects: hotels, castles, villas, restaurants & bars, offices, spas, and chapels creating incredible interiors and architecture. How do you marry the two applications of interiors and architecture?

In architecture, there is no distinction between inside and outside. These are continuous spaces with or without thresholds. I consider that there needs to be a permanent connection between all the spaces and a dialogue that allows everything to make sense to ensure the poetics of the routes. All the spaces I draw are places where human beings wander from inside to outside and vice versa.

You challenge your own vision. Please explain.

Many architects seek to perfect themselves in an area and create modules that they apply to each project. It is a vision that I do not share. Each space has its own DNA, its own history and each new project is a new challenge with new creations. I strive never to look like yesterday.

I love your motto ‘architecture is never simply drawn on a white page’. Could you talk us through that please.

It’s simple!!

If you have to build a cabin in the middle of the desert, without any object as far as the eye can see, it’s not a blank page. This desert has a history, an appurtenance, people who have crossed it for millennia, seasons, winds, lights and at each sunrise and sunset, a color. It is from this heritage that architecture begins.

Do you have a signature style?

I don’t think so, I hope not. But maybe, probably a vision becomes a style after a while. However, there could be a common point to my projects. That’s the fact of absolutely wanting to bring the past and the present into a dialogue.

When working with clients, how do you persuade them to see your vision without it coming across like it’s your idea?

This requires getting to know the client and to let the client get to know me better. To discuss his passions, but also his fears and enter into a dialogue and a level of intimacy that we will no longer need to persuade one another. It can sometimes take time!

The favorite part of your job?

I tend to say that the beginning of a project and the end. At the beginning, we are in a creative process. We superimpose stories, images of eras. Then at the end, we see the fruit of our work.

You have recently decorated three suites at Relais Bernard Loiseau. It’s exquisite. Please tell us about the project.

It was a very nice meeting with Bérangère, then Dominqiue and Blanche. They brought me

the strength and creativity that Bernard Loiseau left as a legacy two decades ago. I tried to innovate by creating a cocoon as a new way to sanctify sleep. To imitate this moment, this space. I kept the codes that characterize the house, and the result is pretty cool.

You were given carte blanche by chef Mallory Gabsi to decorate his first restaurant. That sounds like an amazing project.

Meeting Mallory was like a blessing. He’s very, very young, he’d never done a project in his life, but he’s a genius. I invited him over to my house for lunch and we cooked together, then started sketching ideas and laying materials on the table. Mallory is an incredibly intuitive person, like many people who are a genius. It didn’t take us months to understand each other, and he trusted me very, very quickly. I was able to ask him about a few details so that he felt at home, in his very first restaurant.

What do you do for fun?

I work a lot. But I read also a lot and I isolate myself in the countryside or by the sea on my favorite Greek island to recharge my batteries from time to time and find new inspiration.

Any exciting plans on the horizon?

Opening an office in Dubai, which will be in charge of future iconic projects in the Middle East and in India. Other new castle hotel and restaurant projects are currently in progress and in particular the historic restaurant of the Relais Bernard Loiseau... “La Côte d’Or” Where Ernest Hemingway went to dine or Picasso returned there or even this famous last lunch of Georges Clémenceau in September 1914. |www.arnaudbehzadi.com 