India Mahdavi spots me staring into the window of her Left Bank showroom and laughs at my evident perplexity: the furniture on display is made from pristine white marble, gleaming as a bleached coral reef. What happened to the designer The New Yorker not long ago dubbed a “virtuoso of colour”?

“Don’t worry,” she says with an enigmatic grin, “I’m still polyglot and polychrome.” It’s an aphorism Mahdavi has intoned often over the two decades we’ve known one another, a de facto motto and reference to her multilingual background and her way with hues that appear to exist on a parallel spectrum.