Nina Yashar was born in Theran in 1957, she left the country when she was six years old as her father, a carpet dealer, moved the family to Milano: “a city that has a very similar culture to the one of our home and shares warmth and Mediterranean aspects”. She went to Jewish school there and during her young years she was active within the Feminist movement and very curious for art and creativity. She studied art in Venice during university and then she returned to her beloved Milano. She has always had a passion for design and art but she new that, in order to be able to work on her own, she had to start off with the family business. So she worked for her father in the carpets industry for a little less than a year. After that, in 1979, she opened her own gallery space in via Bigli, the pieces she was selling were a selection of carpet staken from her father’s archive: “I wanted to select something that you wouldn’t see in traditional shops, so I selected all the carpets that had flower motifs, different from the traditional Persian ones”. In the late 70s, after a trip to New York City she had stumbled upon Scandinavian carpets and she thought it was something very different and original from her current possessions. She organised a trip to Stockholm to buy more rugs and, once there, she also bought a collection of design furniture from that country. Once back in Milano she exhibited all the pieces in her space and from there on she started incorporating furniture inher sets. From there on she encountered many different artists and creative and she was able to launch some of the mand be part of their long term carrier, like Martino Gamper, Bethan Laura Wood, Osanna Visconti, Massimiliano Locatelli and many more. Interested in the past creations but with an eye that looks over to the future, Yashar neverstops to look for new talents but also researches in the past. She is well known for owning one of the largest collections of Lina Bo Bardi and Gio Ponti. In 2015 she inaugurated the Depot, a small, living museum, where she selects historical and contemporary pieces, designed by Massimiliano Locatelli. For Nina, curation is innate – something that runs in her blood. It’s also entwined with how she buys – a key aspect of her business. “I would say that 85 percent of my choices are not connected to my business plan,” she says resolutely. “I’ve never bought anything just because I thought it would be easy to sell.” At Nilufar, it’s not so much that budgets are thrown out the window, it’s more that they never existed to begin with. Nina’s business strategy – based on gut feeling – yielded her little profit for a long time, but she explains: “I want people tofollow me. I don’t want to follow them.”