Five Questions On Taste
SHÂNGÉ ART by Nazgol Rezapour & Hadi Amin Rad
DOTbyNANA presents an ongoing editorial series dedicated to brands, artists, and creators with a distinctive universe and an unmistakable sense of taste.
For our first chapter, we begin at home with SHÂNGÉ ART, a maison born from memory, heritage, craftsmanship, love, and a lifelong devotion to beauty.
What does taste mean to you in a world obsessed with trends?
To us, taste has never been about following what is loud, viral, or temporary.
True taste is much quieter. It is instinct. It is memory. It is the invisible language carried through generations.
We both come from families where beauty was never treated as performance. It was simply a way of living. Women who carried elegance naturally. Men remembered for their presence, tailoring, intellect and perfumes. Homes filled with fabrics, art, theatre, paintings, handmade objects, books, music and stories.
In Nazgol’s family, fashion and craftsmanship were always part of life. Her grandfather owned a fabric business in Iran during the golden years of old Tehran, selecting and importing refined textiles with an expert eye. He was known for his exceptional skill in cutting, tailoring and understanding fabric not merely as material, but as possibility.
Her mother, Shadi, is an artist in the truest sense of the word, someone who can transform even the simplest object into something poetic. From painting and sculpture to sewing, interior details and angel-filled murals across the family home, she created a world where beauty felt spiritual, personal and alive.
Hadi’s family carries its own artistic legacy. His grandmother, Sorour Rajaie, was among the pioneering women who stepped onto the theatre stage in Iran, opening a path with courage, grace and presence at a time when such visibility required extraordinary strength.
So for us, taste is not about what is fashionable this season.
It is about culture.
It is about memory.
It is about knowing the difference between something expensive and something meaningful.
In a world increasingly obsessed with imitation, we are drawn to originality. Not perfection. Not trends. But soul.
To us, taste is the courage to remain cultivated in a culture that constantly rewards excess, noise and sameness.
What is something beautifully imperfect about your work that machines could never recreate?
The human emotion behind it.
SHÂNGÉ ART was never created inside a business meeting. It was born through memories, conversations, family histories, travels, love stories, scents, textures and emotions collected over decades.
Many of our pieces carry slight imperfections because they are touched by human hands from beginning to end. Hand-painted ceramics, liquid gold details, mirrored surfaces, asymmetric forms, accidental brush textures; these are not flaws to us. They are proof of life.
No machine could ever recreate the feeling of a woman painting angels across the ceilings of her home simply because beauty lived inside her spirit.
No technology could reproduce generations of women who carried artistry in the way they dressed, stitched, hosted, created and loved.
No algorithm could understand the emotion behind an object made slowly, intuitively and personally.
Our name itself carries that emotion.
SHÂNGÉ was born from Shadi, Nazgol’s mother, and Ange, the French word for angel. It is both a tribute and a continuation: to a mother, to softness, to art, to protection, to the unseen beauty that lives inside a home, a memory, a woman, a family.
What we create is deeply emotional.
And emotion can never be mass produced.
Which city, room, film, or memory feels closest to your universe?
Without hesitation: Budapest.
A city that still holds our hearts.
It was there, in 2011, on the night of Nazgol’s eighteenth birthday, that we first met. It was there we studied, grew up, became who we are, and slowly shaped the emotional and aesthetic universe that would later become SHÂNGÉ ART and DOTbyNANA.
Budapest never felt ordinary to us.
Every street carried a secret. Every building held a memory. A city suspended between beauty and melancholy where art, history, romance and the ghosts of the past coexist so naturally together.
There is something deeply cinematic about Budapest. The fading facades, the old cafés, the candlelit apartments, the quiet bridges at night, the poetry hidden inside its sadness. It is a city that teaches you how to feel deeply.
Some of the strangest, most beautiful and transformative moments of our lives were born there.
And somehow, even today, every stone, every corner and every echo of that city still feels emotionally alive inside us.
Budapest is not simply a place in our story.
It is one of the reasons our story exists at all.
Who is the kind of person you secretly create for?
For people who still feel deeply in a world becoming emotionally numb.
For the rare individuals who notice details others overlook. The ones who understand the difference between luxury and meaning. People who collect objects slowly. Who wear perfume as identity. Who prefer timelessness over attention. Who still believe elegance is connected to intellect, culture, kindness and emotional depth.
We create for the woman who could walk into a room silently and still become unforgettable.
For the woman who does not need to explain her taste because it is visible in the way she moves, chooses, speaks and lives.
We create for the man who values refinement not as performance, but as a way of living.
For the collector, the romantic, the artist, the old soul, the traveller, the woman who loves beauty but refuses to look like everyone else.
Secretly, we create for people who are searching for pieces that feel like fragments of a story rather than products.
What do you hope people feel, not think, when they encounter your brand?
We hope they feel transported.
Not into a trend, but into a world.
A world where beauty still has intimacy.
Where objects carry emotion.
Where craftsmanship still matters.
Where softness is power.
Where elegance is inherited through energy, not money.
More than admiration, we want people to feel nostalgia for something they may have never even lived themselves.
A longing for depth, romance, artistry and cultivated beauty.
SHÂNGÉ ART and DOTbyNANA were never created simply to sell objects. They were created from a shared dream between Nazgol and Hadi: to build something lasting, something full of love and dignity, something that could continue beyond them.
A legacy maison.
A world of taste.
A place where beauty, family, memory, fashion, craftsmanship and emotion meet.
Because for us, style is not decoration.
It is inheritance.
A Few Things We’re Currently Drawn To?
Nature walks with Hadi. Creating professional coffee rituals at home. Experimenting with new coffees. Cooking healthy, elegant and beautifully made meals together.
A fragrance?
Guerlain Shalimar for women & Diptyque Geranium Odorata for men
A hotel or place somewhere in the world?
The Ritz-Carlton Al Bustan Palace in Muscat, where we got married, one of the most unique and stylish hotels in the world.
A book everyone should own at least once?
Memoirs of a Geisha or The Power of Now
A film that never leaves your mind?
Indecent Proposal
An object you find eternally beautiful?
My wedding ring with Hadi: a heart-shaped yellow diamond from India, designed by us, held by two swans.
A song for late nights?
Dalida — Avec Le Temps
Something currently inspiring your universe?
Staying original in a very fake world full of new-rich noise.
Curated by DotByNana