Spatial
Interior architecture & spatial planning
Mehrai Design is a London interior architecture and design studio. Workplaces and members' clubs, restaurants and hotels, residential rollouts and amenity, wellness, mixed-use — down to a single rollout concept or a Lord's box. Every interior decision can sit with us, from the plan to the placed object. You choose where we join the team. We are not all-or-nothing; we are a partnership of when.
Think of it as a shopping list. This is everything we can do — from before you even have a building, to long after the doors open. You choose where we join the team, and how far we go.
Take the whole list, or a single line of it. Lead from Stage 0, drop in at concept, hold the design through construction, or just roll out one idea across a portfolio. You decide where we fit — we shape our role around your team, not the other way round.
We are a multi-disciplinary practice — the kind that holds the architecture and the smallest object on the table within a single point of view. Whether it's a trading floor or a tasting menu, a reception or a residents' lounge, every interior decision is ours: the plan, the structure and services we coordinate against, the light, the acoustics, the material, the joinery, the art, the FF&E. We author all of it, so a place reads as considered in both the move and the detail.
Working across sectors is the source of that perspective, not a dilution of it. A workplace learns the warmth of a restaurant; a members' club takes the rigour of a great office; a residential scheme borrows the welcome of a hotel lobby. Seeing how one world solves what another struggles with is precisely what gives us the long view — and it's what clients come to us for, whichever side they sit on.
From the empty shell to the weight of the cutlery in a restaurant, or the desk a person sits at on their first morning — the breadth is the work. We move fluently between the building and the object, because a place only reads as whole when both have been authored by the same hand.
We work the way the client wants us to. For some that means leading the design from the very first conversation; for others it's joining at one stage to bring an interior up to register, or rolling a single concept out across a portfolio. Either way the role is defined, the boundaries are clear, and the standard never moves.
Our instinct is for the early work — we enjoy being in the room at the planning stage, producing the Stage 0–1 packs that frame what a project could become before a single line is committed. But the scale is yours to set: a whole building, an amenity floor, a show apartment, a Lord's box. No job is too contained if the thinking matters.
And the engagement flexes. Lead the design through Stage 3 and hand over. Stay on as design guardian through construction. Come in for styling alone at the end. We take a stage in full, support an appointed team through it, or step back in where we are needed most — your call, every time.
Lead design through Stage 3, design guardian to handover, or styling alone — the engagement flexes. The discipline behind it does not.
A members' club is not a workplace is not a residential rollout across forty apartments. Each comes with its own programme, its own team — already assembled or yet to be found — its own budget and its own clock. We don't impose a single way of working; we read the conditions of the project in front of us and shape our role to fit them. That is flexibility, held under control.
However a project is structured, the design needs someone who holds the whole. Someone who remembers, on site, the decision made at concept and why it mattered. Someone the contractor, the consultants and the client can all answer to on the question of intent.
That is the role we keep through every project, whatever shape our involvement takes. We slot in where the project needs us — and we guard the design from the first idea to the last detail, so the place that opens is the place that was promised.
We don't work alone, and we never pretend to. The best places are made by good teams. Across our projects we work with contractors, consultants and makers we trust — and we credit them, plainly, because the work is theirs too.
Afsaneh Mehrai is a maximalist with a structural mind. She founded the studio in 2020, but the instinct is older than that — a love of abundance held in check by an understanding of how a room actually works. She is drawn to richness: deep colour, layered texture, the kind of material decision you feel before you can name it. What stops it tipping into excess is her command of the bones underneath — light, proportion, and the way a body moves through a space without ever being told to.
That double vision was earned. As Managing Director of AvroKO London, leading the studio's pan-European work, and before that as Design Director at Modus, she shaped concepts across sectors and across borders — for clients who wanted to know what a place could become, on briefs that ranged from the intimate to the vast. She has directed the design and sat among the consultants, which is why she reads both sides fluently: what a client needs to feel, and what a team needs to build it.
She works fast and decides early, trusting an eye trained over years of watching how people inhabit the rooms made for them. The result is interiors that feel generous and alive — never minimal for its own sake, never decorated for the sake of it. Abundance, edited by someone who knows exactly where the structure is.
From an empty shell to the object placed last — every decision in between, held by one studio.