India Mahdavi developed a traveler’s eye for place before she was a teenager, filing away mental images as she moved from her father’s homeland of Iran to the U.S., then Germany, and finally France with her parents and siblings. Settling into a family apartment in the French Riviera, she would wake up to dappled sunshine on green grass, white shutters against ochre walls, and the ultra-marine haze of the sea a few miles away.

India Mahdavi always been influenced by Matisse and how he approaches light through his vision of color. It’s a quest for light, in fact. Mahdavi had the opportunity to revisit this concept when she was approached by a family friend, a philanthropist based in the U.S., to redesign a holiday house "La Florentina". The five-bedroom villa sat among pencil cypresses and umbrella pines overlooking the sea; its new owner imagined spending time there with his children and entertaining friends around the pool. But the ’80s-era house had been stretched like an old bathing suit to accommodate new needs, to the point of becoming dysfunctional. Simplifying things and, wherever possible, opening up new interior views became Mahdavi’s brief.

In Mahdavi's redesigned villa, starting with tiled floors in a lattice pattern that run from the new double-height entry hall across the spacious living room, into the dining room and through arched doorways to the bedrooms beyond. In the primary bath, broad pajama stripes of Moroccan zellige tile in green and white play off slatted blinds and wavering colored-glass doors—a collage that’s rapturously Matissean.