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Architectural Digest •

This Mumbai production studio is designed like a film that slowly reveals itself

More often than not, when it comes to creating a space, architects Aashna Shah and Ruchir Jain of Mumbai-based RAD co + lab like to resort to a bit of make-believe. “We like to imagine first and design second,” says Shah. For one home, that story might unfold in a sun-dappled English garden. For another, it could begin with a postcard from Japan and end somewhere delightfully wabi-sabi. So when the duo were commissioned to design the office of a leading Mumbai production house in the suburb of S...
Architectural Digest •

Housed in a 70-year-old building, this Puducherry boutique feels almost monastic

Task architect Deepak Jawahar and designer Justine De Penning of Chennai-based The Architecture Story to conjure a space, and chances are, they’ll begin, crucially, by taking things away. Not stripping it bare necessarily, but editing—gently, patiently—until what remains feels almost inevitable. That approach finds its perfect counterpart in fashion designer Naushad Ali’s new boutique in Puducherry, housed within a 70-year-old building in White Town, where, as De Penning explains, the intention...
Architectural Digest •

This 17th-floor Chennai apartment measures space in everyday moments

High above Chennai, on the 17th floor of a tower that gathers both heat and horizon into its embrace, a Sunita Yogesh Studio apartment looks out over a city that never quite settles and, beyond it, a strip of sea that appears and disappears with the light. Inside, however, there is none of that restlessness. The mood is composed, considered, hushed—less about effect than about the art of living well. The home, in a way, mirrors its owners: a couple in their thirties, both in demanding IT careers...
Architectural Digest •

This architect’s Chennai studio is a home disguised as an office

Set on a bustling street in Chennai, the studio occupies a 1980s building that once functioned as a family home. The owners still live upstairs; life continues above in its original domestic register, while the ground floor has passed through years of commercial tenants, each leaving behind their own alterations. Yet beneath those layers, Menon found something intact—a quiet, unshowy integrity. The mosaic floors were what first caught her. Different in every room, slightly irregular, distinctly...
Architectural Digest •

This architect couple gave their parents' 40-year-old Chennai home a delightful upgrade

Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Husband-and-wife architect duo Kavin Sundar and Preethi Baskaran of Chennai studio Two Straight Lines never had that problem, because to Kavin’s parents, Sundar and Raji, their son and daughter-in-law have always been creative first and grown-ups second. So when the couple proposed transforming the underused terrace of the family’s 40-year-old Chennai home into a light-filled extension fo...
Architectural Digest •

This Rajkot cafe is built around traditional courtyards and teracotta

The idea of stepping out rarely comes with the promise of slowing down—especially in bistros and brasseries, where even leisure tends to feel scheduled. You walk in, pick a table, scan the room like you’ve done this before, and instinctively edit yourself to match whatever version of you the space seems to prefer. But every so often, you stumble into a place that resolutely refuses the whole act. Exhibit A: Café Beats.A stacked terracotta matka partition marks the first pause inside Café Beats,...
Architectural Digest •

This jewellery store in Tamil Nadu's Pollachi feels more like an heirloom than a showroom

Architect Sowmya Kumar likes to see the glass half full. The trouble is, when it comes to her work, the founder of Coimbatore-based OWM Architecture can never quite resist filling it right to the brim. She slipped into this habit, almost irreverently, while designing Tvishi, a jewellery store in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, repeatedly revisiting a scheme her client had already enthusiastically green-lit and returning with iteration after iteration—each more dazzling than the last. "There came a point w...
Architectural Digest •

Inside a multi-pavilion Surat home inspired by a grandson’s memory

Distil Surat designer Rahul Dholakia's memories of his grandmother down to their essence, and one scene remains: a mud chullah crackling in the courtyard of their ancestral home, bajra na rotla rising over the flame, and a young boy sitting close enough to carry the smell of smoke with him for years to come. The house itself wasn't remarkable. The memories it contained were. Dholakia grew up in a sprawling Gujarati family that now numbers more than 70 members. Business eventually took him around...
Architectural Digest •

This house in Kerala’s Idukki hills practically disappears into the landscape

More often than not, before he begins designing spaces in real life, architect Prabhul Mathew of Kottayam-based Mindspark Architects likes to create them in his head. Sometimes, these structures are large. Other times, small. Some have gabled roofs. Some, flat ones. But almost all of them, in one way or another, begin on reassuringly flat terrain. For Mathew, however, architecture in real life rarely begins with a predetermined idea of form. Instead, the terrain, climate, vegetation, light, and wind gradually shape the building over time. “The site decides what it needs,” says the architect, who worked alongside team member Shahana Salahudeen.
Architectural Digest •

The Homeowners' Favorite Room in This Napa House Is Actually Outside

For designer Rachel Vineberg Jones and her husband, Eric Jones, their latest chapter was one they hadn’t seen coming. It began with a prolonged hospital stay for their newborn son and continued with the purchase of a 3,000-square-foot home in Napa. “I remember looking around and saying to Eric, ‘There's something about this place—I think it's going to become important to us,’” says the founder of San Francisco–based design studio Vine Projects. At the time, the property offered more promise than...
Architectural Digest India •

A 5,000-square-foot Kanpur farmhouse that channels the energy of a Greek island

There is, throughout the home, a distinct sense that nobody was terribly interested in behaving formally. Corridors widen unexpectedly into conversational pockets; sit-outs appear precisely where one might wish to abandon all productivity with a cup of tea; and nearly every room seems engineered to encourage the art of doing absolutely nothing for slightly longer than intended. “The architecture understands, perhaps wisely, that farmhouses are rarely used according to plan,” says Namrata Somani,...
Architectural Digest India •

This Indian designer turned homesickness into Portland’s warmest textile store

When the time finally came to move into a dedicated studio, Kalia knew she didn’t want a polished commercial showroom stripped of personality. After an uninspiring search through generic retail spaces, she instead bought a small house tucked into a quiet Portland street. “The moment I opened the front door, it just felt right,” she recalls. “I could instantly picture how every space would come together.” That warmth still defines the studio today. Original wood flooring was refinished rather tha...
Architectural Digest •

Built Around a Mango Tree, This Kerala Home Is a New Kind of Greenhouse

Architect Arjun Joshy, by his own admission, is a connoisseur of design and mangoes, in roughly equal measure. For this Kerala home in the Indian city of Thrissur, his first order of business was to save the mango tree at the center of the site.The homeowner, Sharan, is a software engineer who moved back to Kerala during the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift marked a quiet recalibration of pace and priorities. “My wife is a teacher, and we have two young boys. We are a family of six, living together...
Architectural Digest •

Inside a Bandra apartment designed for someone yet to arrive

An interior remodel, as any sage designer will tell you, can go one of two ways—“off-script or very off-script,” laughs interior designer Tejal Mathur, founder and principal of her eponymous Mumbai studio. Her latest project, a 2,000-square-foot apartment in Bandra, belongs firmly to the latter category. “After the first cut of the plan, the owners came back to us with a little surprise,” she continues. “They needed a full-fledged nursery…because, well, she was pregnant.” For Mathur and her team—designers Meha Jadeja, Gayatri Shinde, and Rizzanne Idnani—it meant going back to the drawing board. This time, with a crib in mind.
Architectural Digest •

In this multigenerational Mumbai home, everyday life finds its curve

Interior designer Dhvani Shah trusts her sixth sense—but over the years, she’s developed a seventh to ensure she always backs the sixth. “They called it the ‘sandwich strategy’,” laughs Shah, recalling her latest clients—a family of five, comprising a husband and wife, their five-year-old son, and the husband’s parents, who entrusted her with transforming their bare-shell, builder-grade apartment into a warm, multigenerational oasis.“Material selection was always a highlight because of Dhvani’s...
Architectural Digest •

This 4,500-square-foot Chennai penthouse reads like a riverfront reverie

The dining area is where the home allows itself a small flourish. The vaulted ceiling arches overhead, turning what could have been just another table-and-chairs situation into something with a bit more presence. The bedrooms, on the other hand, dial things down. The master suite is spacious but refreshingly uninterested in showing off. It’s layered with soft materials, muted tones, and the kind of light that makes you linger a little longer. The vaulted ceiling makes a reappearance here too, be...
Architectural Digest •

This quaint garden café in Bengaluru is housed in a 1980s Art Deco bungalow

Arched openings introduce a softness that offsets the otherwise straightforward layout, giving the rooms a slightly old-world lilt. “There was never a moment where we said, ‘let’s make this look a certain way,’” Shetty reflects. “It was more about allowing the materials to settle into themselves—and letting the space feel like it had aged into its current state.” Hovering above it all is a canopy of rain trees, easily the café’s most compelling feature. Their shifting shadows move across tables...
Architectural Digest India •

This lush, forest-like bungalow in Thrissur, Kerala grows around a mango tree

Ensuring the tree’s roots and branches remained undisturbed was no small feat, but the result feels almost inevitable: the staircase coils around the tree, resolving movement while doubling as a focal point—an architectural gesture that is both theatrical and deeply rooted in the life of the house.For Sharan, a software engineer, the move back to Kerala during the COVID-19 pandemic marked a quiet recalibration of pace and priorities. “My wife is a teacher, and we have two young boys. We are a fa...
Architectural Digest •

This climate-responsive home in Hyderabad is designed to make A/C redundant

Architecture, as any architect will tell you, is in a constant state of reinvention. It tends to move forward—rarely backwards, and almost never in both directions at once. Hyderabad-based architects Vamshidhar Reddy and Mounica Reddy of Iki Builds, however, have never quite subscribed to that way of thinking. Their latest project sits right on that edge: a home in Hyderabad that looks like it belongs to the future, yet is rooted in the wisdom of the past.Built entirely by hand, the spaceship-li...
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...
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 India •

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

Working with living material, of course, comes with unpredictability. Sourcing substantial trunks can be logistically challenging. Environmental changes influence their behaviour. There are moments of humour too—including a well-meaning stranger who once offered to chop a carefully selected trunk into firewood. Parekh politely declined, amused by how close the piece had come to becoming kindling instead of art. She began Inochi at what she describes as a reflective stage of life, following a per...
Architectural Digest India •

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...
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