About
Sima Shahnavaz
Senior Interior Designer · Architectural Designer
I am an architect by training and an interior designer by practice. Those two halves are not always comfortable together, and the tension between them is where most of my work comes from.
Background
I hold a B.Arch and have worked for over twelve years. I grew up and trained in Iran, where I practised as an architect and later as a senior interior designer — a mountain villa in the north of the country, a boutique hotel renovation on Kish Island. In 2017 I moved to California.
The first years in the United States were spent somewhere most designers never go: inside the model. At Sanveo I worked in building information modelling, producing 3D models of electrical systems in Revit, running clash coordination against every other trade, and issuing shop drawings for education and commercial projects. The clients were UCSF, UC Merced, Novartis, Agnews and Google. I coordinated a team in India on BIM and clash detection across several of them.
That work is invisible in a finished room, and it is the reason my drawings can be built. Two years of resolving conflicts between services and structure teaches you, permanently, that a design which cannot be coordinated is not a design.
In 2021 I joined RH in San Francisco as a design assistant. Within a year I was promoted to designer, and I now lead multiple residential projects at a time. My role runs the full arc: determining design objectives for a client's space against its architecture, its environment and the way they actually live; using floor plans, sketches and visual presentations to show how the design point of view will be interpreted for their home; and then owning every phase of the client experience from the first conversation through to delivery and installation.
I meet clients in the gallery and in their houses. I have learned more from the second kind of meeting than the first.
Credentials
- Education
- B.Arch — Bachelor of Architecture
- Experience
- 12+ years across architecture and interior design
- Current
- Senior Interior Designer, RH — San Francisco
- Previously
- BIM / Electrical Modelling, Sanveo — Bay Area
- Earlier
- Architect and Senior Interior Designer — Iran
Inspiration
“The profession of architecture is excellent and powerful. It is a profession where passionate individuals can use design and technical knowledge to create meaningful environments that inspire all those who experience them.”
What has stayed with me from that belief is the word 'environments'. Not objects, not schemes — environments. A room is not a composition to be looked at; it is a set of conditions someone lives inside, in low winter light and at three in the afternoon with children in it.
So the work starts with light. Where it lands, what it does to a surface at different hours, which corner of a room never receives it and therefore has to be treated as a different room. Material comes second and colour a distant third.
The landscape a house sits in supplies most of my palettes. Pebble Beach gave bark, weathered stone and bleached timber. Santa Fe gave the specific ochre of its own plaster and the grey-green of desert planting. Wine country gave golden hour, which is not a colour but a quality of light that a scheme can either use or waste.
Outside work I sketch by hand and paint — both of which are slower than the software and better for deciding what something should feel like. And I spend time with my family, which is a useful corrective when you have been staring at a plan for six hours.
Most importantly, it is the colleagues you work with who push you to do better and allow you to be yourself who create an environment conducive to creativity. That is as true of a design team as it is of a house.
What I do
Services, end to end.
Full-service interior design
Concept through installation for whole houses or individual rooms — space planning, specification, procurement and styling, with a single point of responsibility from brief to handover.
Architectural design
B.Arch-trained design across plan, section and elevation. Useful when the interior problem turns out to be an architectural one, which it frequently does.
Technical documentation
CAD drawing sets, elevations and coordinated documentation. Two years of BIM clash coordination behind every drawing issued.
Visualisation
Photoreal renderings produced before ordering, so clients approve the actual room rather than an impression of it.
Procurement & installation
Lead-time planning, delivery sequencing, site supervision and final styling — the phase where most schemes are won or lost.
Hospitality
Guest-room and suite design against operational constraints: durability, housekeeping, replacement cycles and phased installation around a trading property.
The projects themselves are shown privately.
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