Can I interest you in a trip to the dentist? No? It is not exactly the trip you are looking for in a game program, right? Most people, including myself, fear and hate the dentist. Perhaps not real people, who are usually sunny and shipyard in contrast to their spooky work, but certainly the real act of being worked by one of them. The standard dentist's office is sterile, gray and utilitarian. Maybe there is a poster that tells you that “they adhere there”, with a photo of a cat grabbing a branch of trees. They may touch the most harmless radio station they could find while waiting in a seat that seems to be borrowed from an airport in the 1990s. It is not an experience designed to inspire or offer a sense of calm. It is a pen for a torture chamber.
But what if it wasn't? That is the question that Kiyan Mehdizade did when he decided to renew the 12th floor of an office building in the middle of the century in Wilshire Boulevard for his dental practice in Beverly Hills. When Mehdizadeh, who mainly performs cosmetic works such as veneers, implants and rubber jobs, promised to open a third office for his business, sat down and thought about how he wanted the experience of dental work to be felt. When I saw the space he created with the design firm of talk Hyman & Herrero, lush carpets, wooden walls, Italian dominion chairs and monochromatic color schemes that remember the best of the sixties and sixties, I referred to him as an opulent. But Mehdizadeh doesn't see it that way.
“Opulent is not the word I would use,” he told me about Zoom. “I like the word salubres, as something that gives life, do you know what I mean?”
A typical visit to the dentist does not give life as much as it gives anxiety. Someone is going to put a tube in their mouths, will push you with bright metal implements and it is very likely that they will bleed at some point. Worse, if you are doing greater surgery, and you are Zonked in anesthesia, a room full of strangers will see to be dragged by your spouse/best friend/co -worker/boring neighbor who promised to buy dinner for an indeterminate night. His mouth will be full of gauze or cotton balls and his eyes will be half closed as the last call in a sports bar. Mehdizadeh and the designers Adam talk Hyman and Andre Herrero, who work both in architecture and in interior design and Recently he designed Dinner of Fashion Fashion Week in New York 2024 for Thom Browne – I had an answer for that too: a circular office. Tarlap Hyman and Herrero aimed to create a unique space that makes them experience each room differently. These rooms take you on a trip that inevitably leads to the exit.
You start in the lobby, you are going to a cozy waiting room that feels more like the house of someone than a dentist's office, and then move to a scabies white operating room full of light from the adjacent windows on the other side of the hall. When you have finished, you follow the circular path back to the exit. The halls are full of Mehdizadeh's personal art collection, which includes works by Cy Twombly, Leonor Fini and more. There is even tapestry paper in the bathroom with drawings of the erotic artist Tom of Finland, which certainly puts a great tone for visitors. Everything is a great step through the poster “endures there.” All this happens in a continuous loop, without another patient to see it. It doesn't matter where you are in the office, technically it is at your exit.
Tapiz paper in the bathroom with drawings of the erotic artist Tom of Finland.
“It was the idea of the design team to make this little monolith in the middle of the office with the circular hall abroad,” says Mehdizadeh. “[W]When they started talking about traffic flow, they were thinking about it as the way traffic flows in the hall of a hotel or in a large house or something. They were not thinking about it in terms of dentistry: they brought this completely new perspective. “
Dentistry should ideally be a bit private, right? The invasive nature of the same, open mouths, baboo and other body fluids in full exhibition, makes it an activity that makes us feel deeply vulnerable. You are prone, tied to one of those reclining chairs and prepared for an unbearable afternoon. At least when you were a child, there were prizes in the end if you were good. I would always be in charge of being as still as possible during my cleaning. If it could be the most perfect cooperative patient, I thought Maybe I can take two Treasury chest awards. I never got a second prize. A prize for a child was the declared policy and there would be no deviation. Maybe that's why I'm still so nervous to go to the dentist. Not only is it physically scary, but it also reminds me of the limitations of my charm.
There is no reward for still in the dentist chair of Mehdizadeh apart from something similar to peace. What Chalap Hyman and Herrero created was a place for reflection. You can lie prone to a luxurious red sofa and reflect on the nature of existence. It can be wrapped in a pink floor to ceiling room that looks like something out of the movie Barbie. Each room is its own environment, carefully elaborated to make you feel something magical. Ideally, these waiting rooms take him to an inner peace place before his whole mouth is shaken and potentially loses the feeling in his gums. But once you are out of the chair and on your way, you are one step closer to the aesthetic Nirvana.
The perfect smile can be the key to self -esteem, happiness, personal connection. Even more than our eyes, our smile is the key that unlocks trust among strangers. A warm and striking smile has the power to disarm. We trust dentists so that they can help us gain confidence of others. How a dentist, with his exercises and selections and other tools, gains a patient's confidence? Well, as demonstrated by Kiyan Mehdizadeh's office, having good taste certainly help.
Photography courtesy of talk Hyman & Herrero.
