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Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar is an internationally published architecture, design and art journalist.

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Vaishnavi works out of a sunny studio called Mangomonk where she writes for publications big and small.

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Latest Articles

Domino •

This Circa-1883 Home Had Many Former Lives Before It Became the Coolest House on the Block

Chartres 1883, in Bywater, New Orleans, didn’t start out as a home—it started out as everything else. A hay and feed store. A grocery. A café. A soft drink shop. So when a fifth-generation local millworker and his wife spotted the property in 2022, they didn’t see a fixer-upper—they saw a charming piece of history begging for a second act. The couple fell hard—so much so that they bought the building without plans of ever living in it themselves.


Turns out, luck was on their side. The structu...
Architectural Digest •

Inside a 1,100-square-foot Mumbai apartment that runs on two time zones

They say opposites attract, but interior designers Disha Vakharia and Pria Kanakia of Mumbai-based Bear Spaces know firsthand that sometimes, so can distance. When it came to designing their latest labour of love, a 1,100-square-foot Mumbai apartment, they discovered their clients, Pradeep and Jyoti Shah, a savvy couple in their sixties, couldn’t be more different. One was cheerfully diurnal, the other unapologetically nocturnal, turning the brief into a deft exercise in negotiating two entirely...
Wallpaper* •

In Gujarat, two sapodilla trees shape an entire house

Architects Sönke Hoof and Khushnu Panthaki Hoof have an uncanny gift for noticing the almost invisible – that fleeting detail, or lack thereof, that others might overlook. Yet on a summer’s day not so many years ago, as they left the golden clamour of Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, for the languid green of its hinterland, they arrived at a site that appeared to offer almost nothing at all.Like many such plots on the city’s outskirts – some 30 to 40 minutes away, beyond the tightening...
Livingetc •

[Print] Hyderabad: Paper to Pillars

As a young architecture student at New York’s Pratt Institute, Nilasha could scarcely have imagined that she would one day be building houses twice—first out of paper, then in brick and stone. That unlikely reality came true in 2024, when her Hyderabad-based practice, Studio Nilasha, took on a project in the city that demanded a more traditional design language than the studio was used to. Struggling at first to judge the scale and proportions of mouldings and ornamental details, the team resorted to full-scale paper mock-ups. Before long, walls were taped over with balustrades, window grilles and even stained-glass stand-ins, until, as Nilasha jokes, “we accidentally built the entire house in stationery before building it for real.”
The Wall Street Journal •

Tired of Pollen, They Turned Their Porch Into a $250,000 Game-Day Lounge

For most homeowners, it takes years of living in a house—even one they’ve designed themselves—to uncover its quieter drawbacks. That was the case when Bron and Molly Heussenstamm built a $2.2 million custom home on a Memphis, Tenn., family compound.

Molly, 44, is a film and television producer whose credits include “Sicario,” while Bron, 46, is CEO of the sports-media distribution company Bleav; the family also has a home in Los Angeles. Three years after building their Memphis house, they admitted they were losing their battle against pollen, which unfailingly settled into the screened-in porch. In the South in the springtime, “your cars and outdoor furniture can be covered in bright yellow,” says Molly, 44. It was hard to keep the pollen out of the porch, and even harder to keep people in.
The Local Project •

Virgin Active Bondi Westfield by Quattro Architecture with Cosentino

At Westfield Bondi Junction, Virgin Active has unveiled its first global social wellness club – a departure from the traditional gym model and a decisive step towards community-led wellbeing. Designed by Sydney-headquartered Quattro Architecture in collaboration with surfaces company Cosentino, Virgin Active Bondi reimagines the fitness environment as a luxury social destination grounded in ritual, recovery and connection. Material innovation underpins this shift. Central to the project is Dekton, an ultra-compact surface developed by Cosentino through a proprietary process that mirrors the natural metamorphic transformation of stone. The result is a dense, low-porosity surface resistant to heat, moisture and abrasion – attributes particularly suited to wet, high-traffic wellness settings. Carbon neutral and sustainably produced as part of Cosentino’s broader environmental commitments, Dekton enables durability and responsible specification to sit alongside aesthetic refinement.
The Local Project •

Mondrian Gold Coast by Fraser & Partners, Studio Carter and Alexander &CO. - Issue 19 Feature - The Local Project

Beachside locales are often characterised by a free-spirited charm and laid-back energy, but Mondrian Gold Coast, Australia’s first luxury lifestyle property by Mondrian Hotels, elegantly breaks the mould with its elevated coastal flair. Situated in the chic enclave of Burleigh Heads, the 24-storey hotel comprises studios, suites, private beach houses, a sky house, a bio-wellness spa, event spaces and two podium restaurants. The architecture was helmed by Melbourne-based Fraser & Partners, while the interior design was divided between Studio Carter – a California practice that previously worked on the Mondrian Singapore Duxton – and Sydney’s Alexander &CO. The Barrett Group was entrusted with the fit-out and construction of the two restaurants.
The Local Project •

RJ Living Launches Roam Collection

Homes are rarely still. They expand, contract and quietly collect the evidence of everyday life. With Roam, Melbourne-based RJ Living leans into that gentle chaos, delivering its most expansive collection to date – and one designed to move with you. Spanning living, dining, bedroom, storage and accent pieces, Roam is built around the idea that interiors should feel layered and lived-in rather than overly styled. There’s a subtle mid-century influence at play in the confident lines and textural f...
Architectural Digest •

This 150-year-old bungalow in Goa is a sanctuary with a speakeasy soul

Architect Rochelle Santimano doesn’t just see the world in colour—she sees it in full-blown technicolour. “It’s the opposite of being colour-blind,” laughs the founder and principal of Goa-based Studio Praia, for whom every decision is assessed in fifty shades of nuance. The upside? She can spot the difference between scarlet and the right scarlet at twenty paces. The downside? Achieving that exact shade occasionally means sanding down a perfectly good tile in pursuit of chromatic perfection. Su...
Architectural Digest •

This designer in Bhavnagar, Gujarat is turning abandoned tree trunks into living sculptures

Most of us drive past discarded tree trunks without a second glance. Shetal Parekh slows down. She looks again. And then she looks closer. Through her Bhavnagar-based practice, Inochi, she transforms what others leave behind into living sculptural works—pieces that don’t just occupy a room, but quietly alter its energy. Rooted in restraint and guided by intuition, Parekh’s interventions allow each trunk to retain its inherent rhythm, asymmetry, and memory.
Architectural Digest •

This café-bar in Mumbai channels the easy energy of a well-loved living room

Ever since Friends gave us Central Perk, the idea of a café as a second living room has felt less like fiction and more like fellowship. Not the orange sofa or the punchlines, necessarily—but that easy, casual togetherness. The sense that you could walk in at any hour and find your people, your corner, your rhythm. In Bandra, Mumbai, restaurateur Rashi Morbia channels precisely that spirit with The Nook, a 1,500-square-foot café-bar hybrid designed as a social anchor for coffee, cocktails, and conversation. Conceived by Dhvani Shah of her eponymous Mumbai-based design studio, the space nods to Central Perk’s ethos of belonging—not as a motif, but as a mood. Shah describes it as a contemporary “third place”—that elusive zone between home and work where you can loiter with—or without—purpose. “We weren’t interested in replicating a sitcom set,” she says. “It was about capturing that core ethos—a place where everyone belongs, where the seating makes you stay longer than you planned, and the atmosphere feels effortlessly warm.”
The Local Project •

In Focus: CDK Stone - Issue 19 Feature

Comfort, connection and inspiration are the three key elements of CDK Stone’s elevated new experience centre in Sydney. The new selection centre in Sydney’s Alexandria defies the conventions of a typical retail offering. The products don’t vie for attention, nor do they dominate the space: instead, they’re thoughtfully integrated into a calm, gallery-like setting that invites slow discovery and tactile engagement. The new centre is emblematic of a shift towards more elevated, design-led experiences – an ethos that will soon extend to the stone specialist’s other retail formats.
The Local Project •

120 Collins Street by Hassell - Issue 19 Feature

Some things get better with age – though, as Ingrid Bakker, the principal, board director and co-leader of the commercial and workplace sector at Hassell, will attest, they sometimes need a little help along the way. Such was the case with 120 Collins Street, a landmark skyscraper on the storied street in Melbourne’s CBD, originally completed by Hassell in association with architect Daryl Jackson in 1991. The ground floor and entrance had gradually lost their lustre, and to restore the 35-year-old spaces to their former glory, Hassell returned to lead the transformation, creating a revitalised, future-facing experience that pays homage to the original while meeting contemporary expectations.
Architectural Digest •

Abandoned for 20 years, this century-old granary in Kerala is now a weekend home

In the village of Kollengode in Kerala’s Palakkad district, framed against the hazy outline of the Western Ghats and cradled by paddy fields and a tranquil pond, stands a century-old granary that passersby might mistake for a forgotten relic, its laterite walls burnished by monsoon after monsoon, its timber beams darkened with age. Abandoned for over twenty years, it served as a silent sentinel to passing seasons—slowly forgotten by generation after generation of the family to whom it belonged....
Architectural Digest •

Inside a Mumbai apartment where colour keeps its cool across 3 bedrooms

Colour is a tricky affair. Whisper “beige” and a maximalist shudders; shout “fuchsia” and a minimalist reaches for a calming white wall. For some, it’s a love language. For others, a calculated risk. But for architects Kasturi Wagh and Vineet Hingorani of Mumbai-based kaviar:collaborative, it was a bit of both. “We like to think we’re colour-committed, not colour-crazy,” laughs Wagh, nodding to the studio’s past work—comfortably hushed, quietly tonal, and far more fluent in nuance than in noise. That knack for subtlety is exactly what Priyankka and Prathamesh Sonawane were looking for when they stumbled upon the studio on Instagram. “They’d been following our work for a while and reached out saying they felt aligned with our design language and wanted to work with us specifically,” says Hingorani. The energies clicked—and suddenly, colour didn’t feel quite so tricky anymore.
Architectural Digest •

This 24-seater, 12-course restaurant in Bengaluru mirrors the phases of the moon

In the city's ever-evolving dining firmament, Nila rises gently rather than in a blaze of neon. The 24-seater, chef-led restaurant in Bengaluru by Rahul Sharma is devoted to hyper-regional cuisine, expressed through a 12-course tasting menu that changes every three months—an edible cycle attuned to harvests, memory and mood. The name means moon, and while Prachi Joshi of the Bengaluru studio Designworx did not christen it, she designed the space as though it were in quiet orbit around that idea....
Vogue •

An upcoming exhibit in Hyderabad transforms a table into an art gallery

These days, nothing surprises Eeshaan Kashyap. “It’s the new normal,” he says, smiling from his Zoom tile, referring to the sort of commissions currently crossing his desk. A ruby-studded knife to slice a wedding cake. And more recently, a thali set emblazoned with jade. Then again, for Kashyap, what’s normal anyway?At 40, most roads in his world lead back to food. A trained chef who no longer cooks professionally, Kashyap treats the table less as furniture and more as theatre—a platform where m...
Domino •

This 1954 Cottage Is Swedish Seaside Living at Its Finest

Ask anyone who knows Ika Ramel and Sanna Nathanson, and they’ll swear that the Stockholm-based designers are 1950s souls living in millennial bodies. “We just love anything old,” says Ramel—and by anything, she mostly means homes. So when a father and his three children invited the Studio Ramson founders to reimagine their single-story midcentury house along Sweden’s southwestern coast, it felt less like a commission and more like fate.
The Local Project •

Michael Kirby Building by Hassell

A few years ago, Macquarie University’s Wallumattagal Campus, situated on Dharug Country in Sydney, Australia, looked a little different. The tired circa-1985 structure that masqueraded as the administration centre is now where the Michael Kirby Building stands. When architectural firm Hassell ultimately took up the gauntlet of reimagining the space into a contemporary learning destination, the intent was never to undo the past but to honour it in making room for the future.
Vogue •

How restoring a 125-year-old bungalow in Goa prepared a busy publicist for fatherhood

If you had asked Prabhat Choudhary where home was ten years ago, he might have hesitated—hemming and hawing, flicking through a mental slideshow of places he’d visited, and even the homes he had designed for himself across the country—before finally conceding that home was everywhere, and nowhere at all. Today, seated across from me in a hotel café, the 46-year-old PR honcho does none of that. He does not deliver a dialogue on all the cities he’s disembarked in this year, nor does he treat me to...
The Local Project •

Hendry Compound by Garret Cord Werner Architects & Interior Designers, HB Design and Donohoe Living Landscapes

“What drew us to this project was the combination of beautiful architecture, a site with great potential and clients whose vision aligned with ours,” says Bradner, a partner at Vancouver-based HB Design. Her interiors are anchored in a neutral, earthy palette inspired by the tones of the North Shore, layered with darker, timeless finishes. Brick, stone and warm timber are softened with tactile fabrics and calibrated light. Custom millwork integrates storage into the architecture, while expansive...
The Local Project •

Basil Bangs at the Mondrian Gold Coast

Mondrian Gold Coast – the esteemed hotel brand’s debut outpost in Australia – is a kaleidoscope of ocean vistas, sun-drenched interiors and bold design gestures that blur the line between laid-back luxury and contemporary sophistication. In the surfside enclave of Burleigh Heads, the property channels the area’s relaxed energy while layering it with Mondrian’s signature edge. With architecture by Fraser & Partners and interiors by Studio Carter and Alexander &CO, the hotel strikes a harmonious balance between playful and polished.
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Architectural Digest •

Inside a coastal Karnataka bungalow inspired by childhood memory

As sometimes happens when inspiration strikes, Salian found himself guided by flashes of memory, or as he puts it, “a faint, sensorial fragment from childhood. I remember stepping into a Mangalore tile factory, now long vanished, and being enveloped by its vastness. A double-height roof stretched overhead, its terracotta tiles resting on an exposed lattice of wooden trusses. The air was thick with the scent of sun-baked clay and ash. Light filtered in from high openings, casting long shadows acr...
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Diipa Büller-Khosla's canal house in Amsterdam is a postcard from 1614

Even from 6,000 kilometres away, Diipa Büller-Khosla’s energy is palpable through the screen. It’s morning where she is, and she and her husband and business partner, Dutch former diplomat, Oleg Büller-Khosla (the couple legally adopted each other's last names when they married in 2018) are perched in the kitchen of their Amsterdam home, in the company of their pet pooches, Kubii and Bimbo.

By their own admission, it’s a scene that just a few years ago, was a figment of their imagination. “We'd
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Ishaan Khatter’s Mumbai apartment is a sunset sanctuary

When he isn't busy filming or promoting or air-dashing off to exotic locales, Ishaan Khatter likes to appreciate the little things in life. “On Sunday mornings, when time permits, I slip off for a bike ride. In the evenings, I like to watch the sunset with some music and coffee,” says the actor, who was last seen in supernatural comedy Phone Bhoot, alongside Katrina Kaif and Siddhant Chaturvedi. So when he moved in a three-bedroom apartment along the Bandra sea face, naturally, his first priorit
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Actor Aahana Kumra’s Mumbai apartment is a pretty-in-pink princess pad

In a building full of identical brown doors, Aahana Kumra's entrance is the only non-brown curiosity. "I absolutely love pink. It's my all-time favourite colour—that's why it's right at the front," she laughs, holding open the candyfloss-coloured opuscule as she ushers me inside. For Kumra, the home is a manifestation twenty years in the making, and one that nods equally to her Lucknowi roots and her life in Mumbai. "There are whiffs of Kashmir, London and Delhi too. It's a collection of all my
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Actor Aparshakti Khurana’s Mumbai home displays drama in the details

Even before they had finalised their house, or decided who would design it, actor Aparshakti Khurana and his wife, events entrepreneur Aakriti Ahuja, had a chandelier picked out and stowed away in storage. "I had spotted it some years ago in Delhi and just knew I had to buy it," laughs Aakriti, and Aparshakti chimes in, "We had no idea what our future house would look like. Nothing was set in stone, except this big, blue bhaisahab." The bhaisahab in question now occupies a corner of their living
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Singer Armaan Malik’s Mumbai home is halfway between London and Los Angeles

At 10 AM on a Sunday, the last thing you'd expect is for Armaan Malik to be crisping the edges of a frittata. And yet, that's exactly the sight that greets me as I step into his kitchen, a California-cool bolthole with a London-esque edge. "I love making breakfast and treating myself to a good spread," he says, drizzling butter on bruschettas. Dressed in a casual button-up and chinos, he looks like a laid-back version of his on-screen alter ego, who, as fans of The Voice (on which Armaan appears
Architectural Digest •

AD Visits: Actors Aditya Seal and Anushka Ranjan’s newlywed nest is a storybook come to life

At the door of actors (and newlyweds) Aditya Seal and Anushka Ranjan Seal's new Mumbai duplex, the nameplate is conspicuous by its absence. What is not is the cheery (LED) baby seal that takes its place, animating the wall and nodding to its namesake owners. “It's fun to watch people guess," says Anushka. "Those who get it, get it. And it makes for a great conversation-starter." But the unlikely sea creature isn’t the only thing setting the entryway apart—because if the peach-toned front door (a