Designer finds ideas wherever he looks
BELLEVUE, Wash. — Not only does Farshad Mahramnia see creative potential everywhere, he also brings it home.
This means two things: First, his wife, Laleh Zadeh, doesn’t get to park in their crowded-withpotential garage/storage area/studio all that often.
Second, once Mahramnia acts on all that artistic potential (and he does, eventually), he brings it inside their home, where it is head-spinningly apparent what a visionary creator he is.
Mahramnia owns and operates Unique Design (@uniquedesignllc on Instagram), envisioning, designing and creating what he calls “one-of-akind architectural, decorative and functional art.”
“Unique” and “one-of-akind” are perfectly appropriate adjectives, but sometimes you wish there were one more powerful.
“Inspired,” with the strength of several senses in one word, could be a contender.
Mahramnia and Zadeh moved to Bellevue, Wash., from Iran 19 years ago and now live here with their two daughters, 11-year-old Rojan and 8-year-old Roxana.
“When we came to the U.S. as immigrants, to survive, we really needed a job,” says Zadeh. “He started as an assistant to a carpenter. Because he’s an artist with a vision, he picked it up really quickly and started his own business in one year. Because he has a good vision, custom houses incorporated his art. He’d say, ‘I have this idea: You can make this wine-cellar door very pretty.’ A few years ago, we Farshad Mahramnia works on his latest creation, a woman’s face made out of copper, in his garage studio.
started our own house.”
Mahramnia’s talent is inherent; his influences, like his work, have evolved over time. “Back home, I worked in artwork, engraving copper: very traditional art,” says Farshad, who is currently working on a series of brass-and-copper sculptures. “Now art is more of a hobby. Sometimes in my art I don’t want to use anything all-Persian, but when I draw it, it just comes.”
Essentially, their entire home serves as a showroom of influence and inspiration: a livable, luxurious gallery of exquisite design, creativity and skill, inside and out.
The couple had a blank canvas with which to work, after teaming with Seattle architect Chris Luthi on a major remodel of the site’s existing, artless 1959 rambler. Even before its demolition, Mahramnia was at work, creating.
“The front doors I premade one year before the house,” he says. “The stair railing, brass, was premade.”
Brass is big here. Bronze too. Copper. And wood.
“All kinds of wood,” Mahramnia says. “Maple,
walnut, birch, cedar. Everything.”
Some pieces have been salvaged from demo sites. Some have been repurposed from old furniture. Some, like the hemlock of the 8-foot-tall front doors, came from a lumber store.
This particular portal of potential first appeared to Mahramnia in a photo.
“I had an idea, 18thcentury French,” he says. “I saw a picture and tried to make it myself. I wanted it to look old. I painted a crack to look a little old; it’s not nice and clean.”
Just inside those amazing doors: a staircase so detailed, so inspired, you will gape at it until you’ve forgotten why you needed to go upstairs.
“The stairs I made myself, from maple, regular lumber,” he says. “I cut it into shape. It’s a little unusual. The brass is inset in iron. This is my idea. I never saw anyone use brass for a picket. For the post, I cut the iron and formed it. I just designed it myself.”
In the living room, Mahramnia finished and sanded the fireplace (with marble accents) and painted it an antique black. Also, Zadeh says, “he Mahramnia found this painting in an old shed that was being cleaned out at a job site. He built the frame himself and hung it above the fireplace, which he also designed.
painted the shades and added the tassels.”
Mahramnia made the coffee table, which holds a “very old” 35-inch copper tray he brought back from Iran. Other copper trays, or components of trays, show up in the media-room card table and, in the powder room, in the frame around the mirror, on a table under the window and hammered into a bowl for the bathroom sink.
That gorgeous window? Previously just a piece of plain glass Mahramnia
picked up somewhere, seeing something.
“He just goes to estate sales and buys it and saves it,” says Zadeh. “I say, ‘What are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m going to do something with it later.’ ”
In the media room, the cabinets under a stunning bar of rainforest granite and live-edge maple had rested as potential until inspiration struck to add copper and glass.
“Usually, when I see something, I buy it and leave it in the garage and
use it in a few years,” Mahramnia says.
Outside, where Mahramnia crafted a spectacular fence from a tree felled by the city of Issaquah (“I kept it two or three years and didn’t know what I’d do with it,” he says), and a gate with historic door-knockers from Iran, he points out the copper fireplace chimney he designed — or, maybe, “is designing,” not quite past tense.
“I forgot about this one,” he says. “I will keep going.”