JUDGE PAMELA SHAMSHIRI INTERIOR DESIGNER

Story-telling interior wizard

- TF CHAN

It’s been seven years since Pamela Shamshiri set up her LA-based architecture and interior design studio, striking out on her own after a decade as co-founder of Commune Design. ‘I was ready to do something slightly different and with my own voice, not as part of a collective,’ reflects the Iranian-born designer. ‘I’m very much into experience, wellbeing, narrative, fantasy, folly, old and new, and time travel, and I get to do all of that at my own studio.’

Studio Shamshiri is now one of the most sought-after names in American design, with up to 30 active projects at a time, and an illustrious client list that includes Ryan Murphy, Anne Hathaway and Paul McCartney. Residential projects are Shamshiri’s forte: she recently updated the modernist residence of LA gallerist Shulamit Nazarian, and teamed up with architect studio Johnston Marklee to create a second home in Pacific Palisades for a pair of blue-chip art collectors (W*276). But she is equally adroit at commercial design: as the Design Awards issue was going to press, she was putting the finishing touches on a flagship store for jewellery designer Irene Neuwirth on New York’s Upper East Side, which she describes as a work of ‘magical surrealism, taking city dwellers on a journey through a fantastical jungle’.