Nina Magon Bets Wellness Belongs Inside The Home, Not On The Amenity Floor
By Rebecca Suhrawardi, Contributor
French by birth, old-world by nature, radical in its presentations, and European enough to not be in the habit of surprises, Maison&Objet is the definition of design establishment.
But in June 2024, it named its United States ambassador: a woman from Houston, of Indian descent, who came to interior design through a finance degree and a kickstart in the industry as a contestant on a reality competition show.
Now, Nina Magon is an insider on terrain that she has publicly described as dominated by European men, and that she represents America for Maison&Objet suggests that, in very French fashion, la roue tourne.
It started twelve years ago when Magon became a semi-finalist on Nate Berkus’s American Dream Builders, a show that pitted designers against each other for a $250,000 prize. A daunting experience, which she describes in an interview for this article, that left her “wanting to leave after day one” and “hoping to God” she would get eliminated.
Magon was only a few years into her design career. Yet on the show, she was competing against contestants such as Elaine Griffin, who at the time was one of House Beautiful’s Top 100 American Designers, the first Black Contributing Editor at Elle Décor, and a regular on the Today show. Magon almost made it to the end–she was eliminated in week 9 of 10, the same episode as Griffin.
WHERE WELLNESS LIVES
Now, after marked shifts and aesthetic risks in her work, a spread in Architectural Digest, projects for clients such as Balmain and Bergdorf Goodman, Magon is embarking on her most ambitious project yet: defining where wellness lives.
Right now, according to Magon, wellness can be found in retreats and hotels such as the Aman, or specialist spas such as Remedy Place. Places where people have to travel to experience the benefits and within a group environment. Elements which Magon is setting out to counter.
“The way to focus on the self is when you are in a daily ritual, doing something every single day, where it’s life-changing,” she says. “That’s the only way that change happens.”
The solution, in Magon’s perspective, is a room.
Every unit at her new KA Residences gives over 400 square feet to what she has named the Merkaba room, after the chariot of ancient mysticism. Inside it is a toolkit for any longevity enthusiast: a meditation pod, an oxygen chamber, a hot-cold plunge, red light therapy, and just beyond it, a pool on the balcony.
The equipment isn’t the point. What Magon understands, and what the branded-residence business has not, is that the amenity floor is too much of a social space to be a therapeutic one.
“You have to still make an effort to look good,” she says of the St. Regis and the Ritz-Carlton down the road in Houston. “You have to go into an elevator with other people.” The Merkaba room’s luxury is more than the oxygen chamber. It’s that nobody is with you when you use it.
The first KA residence is set to be thirty units consisting of three penthouses, eighteen three-bedrooms, and nine two-bedrooms. The building sits on a bayou where peacocks wander and is framed by the Houston skyline.
Something Magon is very clear about is that this is not a translation of hospitality into residential living.
“We’re rethinking what a home should be and how people are going to live in their homes every single day, and the main question is: will this help someone live better tomorrow than they’re living today?”
In a sense, it’s an idea that’s been the backbone of her work for some time.
“About five, ten years ago, one of my main slogans was, why do you have to go to a hotel to understand what luxury is? Why can’t you experience that luxury in your home?” Now, wellness has moved into a position of luxury, and as she’s done many times in her career, she’s bringing luxury home.
The name KA arrived to her in a dream after a walk in the Costa Rican rainforest with her business partner. She had never heard the word before and learned that it’s an ancient Egyptian term tied to life force and defined as a return to self. “I do believe that if you open your mind and heart to listening and hearing, you will listen and you will hear, and the answers will come to you,” Magon says.
In January, she’s off to Paris. Maison&Objet has given her a Design Showcase at the fair, which its chief executive describes as a testament to her lasting impact on contemporary design. Now, the studio that started off offering tassels at High Point because they were what sold in Texas will have its own stage at one of the world’s most well-known design fairs, a long way from hoping to be sent home.
