Gabriel Hendifar as a baby. 
Hendifar with his father, Joseph, and grandmother, Shazdeh. 
Hendifar’s mother (right) dancing with a family friend.
Gabriel Hendifar is the artistic director of the design studio Apparatus.
“My parents came to Los Angeles in 1980, from Iran. They left mid-revolution, and landed in L.A. inconveniently, right during the Iran hostage crisis. They arrived in this country feeling like they were wedged between two cultures they didn’t fit in to.
So my feeling of home was always that it was this oasis, a cocoon they’d created, a place to nurture and feed. There was a lot of joy, a lot of music, a lot of family in my childhood home. But there was also a very real feeling of protection from the outside world.
We lived in a small, Spanish-style two-bedroom duplex in the Miracle Mile area. Right next door to us lived my grandparents, my mother’s parents. It was really lovely growing up next to them. If our house had one foot in Iran and the other in America, my grandparents’ place felt one step closer to Iran. It felt like a mysterious portal to a world that I didn’t understand. I was 2 years old at the time, and we were in this house until I was about 11, which is really what I consider the most formative time to establish a conception of home.
Inside, the house was a combination of Persian rugs that were an art form my family held in high regard, a connection to the place they came from. There were always rugs on the floor. For a time the furniture was Louis XVI reproductions, very ornate—but covered in plastic. Because, as an immigrant family, you want to make sure everything always looks as good as it can, and stays as pristine as possible.
The home worked for us in the sense that it provided for experiences. We almost didn’t think about the space. It was an extension of [our lives]. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have this many people over. How do we make that happen?’
As a first-generation American, you really sense the differences in how other people experience home. You really clock, like, ‘Oh, this is how my family sits in the living room,’ and then, being exposed to other people who had other ideas for their floor plans, you think, ‘Oh, these are the kinds of experiences this family has.’
Through those differences, I started to see how those choices create an envelope, an intention. Intention has been the guiding force of the work I do now. Everything we make is ultimately in service of creating an envelope that we, or a client, chooses to create in order to anticipate a certain frequency of human interaction.
Hendifar with his siblings, Nic and Michael. 
A haft-seen, a table with a traditional arrangement of seven symbolic items, for Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
I came out when I was 13, in 1994. It was when being gay was kind of bleak, and I had a tough time with my family. All of that has evolved in really beautiful ways, but there were things that signaled to me that I was ‘other’ inside another community. My response to that was to distance myself from the impulses, the instincts, the traditions that I came from, because I kind of convinced myself that there wasn’t room for me.
That’s when I developed this gaze toward the Western, the academic, and ideas of design and music. I grew up playing the piano. My mother plays the piano by ear and sings and is incredibly talented, and that’s where I got that love. But I decided that, to be a real musician, I needed to study Western classical music and theory. I did that, and I fucking loved it. I really excelled. But I did it, in a way, to legitimize myself, because I didn’t feel like where I came from in those traditions were enough. For me, the journey has been to enlist my ambition in getting to where I want to be, and to the place where I would arrive, and feel legitimate. At 43 years old, I’ve finally done it.
In my childhood home, and in subsequent apartments we lived in, I was always very aware of the front door. It felt very much like the portal, a pass-through: You were inside or outside of an experience that’s both real and not entirely connected to the outside world, and has its own sense of history.
The interior architecture of the last apartment I was in had been designed by John Pawson before I got there. He designed a secondary door over the front door, which essentially, when it was closed, integrated it into this wood paneling, so you had no awareness of where the front door was.
The idea of obscuring the entrance is something that I’m now obsessed with. I’m in a new apartment now, and I don’t actually want to know where the front door is. When I’m in here, I want to feel like I’ve made the choice to wrap myself in this blanket. I can choose to unwrap myself, but it’s a choice.
So now I have—this is going to sound like a 16-year-old’s apartment, and it’s not that—a bead-chain intervention in the entrance of my apartment, which I can pull aside when I need to get through the door. When I’m in for the night, I close it. I feel like, ‘Here we are. We’re in the set. The play is about to begin.’ Doing this has a sense of ritual.
What makes a house a home? It can be like, ‘What are the things that make me feel like I’ve landed here?’ For me, it’s about all the choices, about having agency in your own space, whatever that means to you. Home is also about the energy: the life you breathe into it.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: Courtesy Gabriel Hendifar)