The New Apparatus Lighting Collection Is an Homage to Mom

Last March, at a Persian New Year party he hosted with chef Andy Baraghani, a fellow Iranian American, Gabriel Hendifar saw his own story from a new vantage point. He’d asked his mother to sing while he played the piano and his sister, Nic, kept time on the tombak, a traditional hand drum. Halfway through the evening, Hendifar, artistic director and CEO of the New York City design studio Apparatus, realized they’d re-created the sounds of his childhood home in Los Angeles, where his mother had immigrated from Tehran. “That night shifted everything for me,” says Hendifar, who decided to channel that exact feeling into his next collection. “I felt like this cornerstone in the foundation just slipped back into place.”A constellation of Gol pendants, their fiberglass shades encasing glowing orbs of cast glass. It’s a fitting origin for Act V: Afsaneh, (the Persian word for fable and also, coincidentally, his mother’s name), which finds him returning, 14 years after cofounding the brand, to the ultimate divine feminine—his mother—and the women in his family whom he thinks of as “goddesses.” As he explains: “They taught me what it means to honor a guest and what it means to share your space.” Using universal forms, the new range of furniture, lighting, and rugs tells a story about what it means to hold and pass on knowledge. The seed, Esfand, is rendered as ovoid lamps and incense holders. The blooming flower, Gol, becomes diaphanous pendants. The serpent, Rahvi, collector of knowledge, is translated into segmented light fixtures that seem to slither through space. And the world, Jahaan, is transformed into globe-like tables with shimmering cast-glass tops that resemble the cosmos. “It felt like these shapes were coming to me from a dream,” says Hendifar. “There was a lot of trust in waiting for things to appear.”A custom canopied divan, constructed entirely with Rahvi light fixtures and hardware. The cocktail table, which holds a stick of incense at the base, is made of Aged aluminum and shimmering cast glass. A detail of the Gol pendant It wasn’t only in dreams that he found inspiration. Hendifar first saw Rahvi’s distinctive curve in the “Alaïa meets Sade” look of a friend’s tightly banded ponytail. Meanwhile, he modeled the Jahaan table—realized at both dining and drinks size—after the tombak his father played.Employing new materials, Hendifar has used this body of work as an opportunity to expand his offerings in both scale and typology. Fiberglass, for example, allowed him to create a 40-inch-wide Gol fixture, while wool bouclé brings new texture to existing modular rugs. All is awash in colors that conjure a garden of earthly delights, with the Esfand sconces and the Jahaan dining table available in custom speckled-lacquer colors: sky, honey, pomegranate, milk, night, and dusk. The Rahvi lights, meanwhile, are adorned with jewelry-like amulets of semiprecious stones.One configuration of the Rahvi light fixture, which is adorned with eight amulets. Over the four years that Hendifar developed this collection, he was simultaneously appointing his new apartment in SoHo. “Part of me is addicted to the process,” he says, now settled in the airyloft. “I was able to think through how I want to live, how I want to feel, and how I can offer that to other people.” In his research for both projects, his mood boards filled up with references to periods of intense cultural flowering cut short—Weimar Germany, 1970s Iran, Cuba in the ’50s, and New York City before the AIDS crisis. With Afsaneh, he interprets such eras as moments of opportunity rather than elegy, imagining what might have been. “It’s less about a tragic turn and more about the cycle,” he explains. “That’s where I find hope.”This story appears in the October issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.