Bright Starck

Ara Starck comes bounding to the door, a cup of Mariage Frères tea in one hand and an English biscuit in the other. The 31-year-old artist apologises profusely. She has been in a photo shoot all morning; she is preparing for an exhibition in three weeks. She is charmingly breathless and has clear plastic braces on her teeth. 'It was the first thing I bought after my first exhibition,' she explains. If anything, the braces do not distract from her beauty - oddly, they give her even more allure.

Inside Ara's atelier, where she also lives, in a commercial neighbourhood near the Louvre, canvasses are neatly stacked against the walls and there is a high wooden cabinet stuffed with brushes and tubes of oil paint. There is a tall portrait of a trapeze artist who happens to be her cousin and has a striking resemblance to Ara; there are also charcoal sketches lining the floor.

There is a long, thin sketch; the preparation for an installation that she is creating on commission. There are chalk messages written on the floor, the work of another artist friend who dropped by recently; and another canvas that says HEARTACHE, which she did for a gay friend who had recently been dumped. There is a photograph of her father, the über-designer Philippe Starck, for his 60th birthday in January with the words WE LOVE YOU written on it.

Her apartment is cool and hip but not as intimidating as I imagined before I rang the bell, for the daughter of the man who redesigned the Royalton hotel in New York and the Mondrian hotel in LA, and now Le Meurice hotel in Paris. Her apartment is warm and real, and while large and sunny, it seems like a typical eccentric artist's studio.

Ara is dressed in black - tight PVC leggings which are great. She tells me where to buy them in Paris. 'But get them a size smaller, they stretch,' she says, pulling at the waistband, which indeed has expanded a few inches.

They are very close, father and daughter, but Ara has never violated the Starck family rule: 'No working together'. Except once.

The result of that one time is now on permanent display at Le Meurice, the grand hotel a few minutes' walk from her home on rue de Rivoli. Her father has recently designed the interiors and when a competition was opened up to artists to design the gigantic dome of the Dali room, Ara entered anonymously. Her father, she says, selected her design for the ceiling without knowing it was his daughter's. When Starck found out his favourite design was by her, she says he phoned her slightly annoyed. 'What is this, they say this is your design.' And Ara, who has tried to forge her independence and her own life outside the shadow of Philippe Starck, admitted it. She got the commission and spent five months stomping around a studio preparing a 145sq m canvas (the size of her Paris apartment) in triangular pieces. The pieces, which ended up weighing 250kg, were later fitted and hung on the ceiling by engineers.

'Look, I'm so small that big pieces fascinate me,' she says, explaining that she worked using 'big gestures' with brushes and lots of sponges. The entire staff of Le Meurice got involved every step of the way, she says, including the dishwashers. They saw the work in progress and she asked for their input. The night it was installed, Ara stayed up with the engineers working in 'the underground of the hotel - amazing! It's a hidden city!' and the entire hotel was closed for a night. 'God, I was so happy when it was finished,' she says. 'It's not that it was a challenge, because I so wanted to do it.'

Her mother, Brigitte, was a lawyer who worked in her father's business. She died when Ara was a teenager, from breast cancer. 'My mum was a hotshot lawyer but when she met my father they decided to go round the world and do the gypsy thing.' They were together for 23 years. Her father has since married three more times, and had three more children. Did that bother you? 'Not at all,' she says breezily. 'We are completely bohemian, so whenever someone comes into the family we think of it as a blessing. My father is a serial monogamist - he is a really good example of a faithful man - and he's 60 now, so I think it's OK for him to have had three more women.' So there was no awkward stepmothering? 'I was very lucky. And anyway we never lived in the same country.'