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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...
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.”
Architectural Digest India •

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

Morbia was clear: no safe neutrals. “The vibrancy isn’t decorative—it’s emotional,” says Shah. “It signals energy, humour, and connection.” Woven rattan, linen upholstery, fluted panels, brick, and concrete create a layered material palette; bar stools were custom-made by a local artisan, while lounge seating was tailored to suit the scheme. The Nook isn’t a set piece. It’s built for real life—caffeinated mornings, clinking glasses, impromptu playlists, and conversations that linger. After all,...
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 India •

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

Also read: 7 small town homes in Karnataka that are in harmony with their surroundingsA verandah and a bathroom found their place carefully, added with a gentle hand so as not to overwhelm the granary’s original form. The verandah’s columns came from a dismantled local home, and a stone pillar from a nearby temple now anchors the outdoor space, carrying whispers of history into the present. The main door was lovingly restored, and wherever possible, windows, tiles, and timber were revived, each...
Architectural Digest India •

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

The Sonawanes knew from the get-go what they wanted—and also what they didn’t. Yes, please to colour. No, thank you to too much of it. Calm and easy-going, they were united in one clear directive: a home that felt composed, not brash. That tiny ask became the guiding principle for their 3-bedroom apartment in Mulund, tucked away from Mumbai’s usual chaos. Luckily, Wagh and Hingorani—with support from in-house interior designer Bansari Shelat—had a trick up their sleeves: keeping colour subtle, w...
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....
Architectural Digest •

This 50th-floor home in South Mumbai bridges art, sound and space

Combining two apartments, more often than not, is a conundrum in and of itself. But in this home in South Mumbai, the apartments in question are separated by a skybridge, so the challenge shifts from clever planning to near-architectural gymnastics. Luckily, architects Amit Khanolkar and Advait Potnia enjoy a bit of mental parkour—and the occasional design puzzle that refuses to sit still. And if there was one thing about their latest brief that hit the spot, it was that: a spatial riddle that r...
Architectural Digest •

An architect designed a home in Hyderabad for her parents, with intimacy in every detail

“Ornateness held little appeal to them,” says Lokirev of her parents, the primary homeowners, describing them as “simple, easy-going people” who value a quiet, grounded way of life and a close relationship with nature. Instead of grandeur, they wanted a home that felt natural, comfortable, and uncluttered. “We were never looking for anything grand,” they explain. “Our main expectation was just to have a home that works for us—comfortable, practical, and easy to live in.” This sensibility shaped...
Architectural Digest India •

Inside the restoration of Kerala’s Kilimanoor Palace, the birthplace of Raja Ravi Varma

Walls, as historians will avouch, are enchanting relics—holding on to architectural memory even when everything else has faded. Few places demonstrate this better than the Kilimanoor Palace, the famed ancestral home of Raja Ravi Varma, where long corridors, quiet verandahs, and timeworn masonry speak more eloquently than ornament ever could. Recently, one small yet significant fragment of this vast palace complex—the southern wing known as the Thekkekottaram—was gently coaxed back to life. The task, however, was far from straightforward. There were no old photographs to refer to, no grand restoration budget, and nary any pressure—none whatsoever—to turn the house into a polished showpiece. Instead, architect Aswathy Ganesh of Kochi-based The One Architecture Studio was presented with a deceptively simple question: how do you restore a home that survives largely in memory? The brief came from eminent Malayalam literary translator Prasanna Varma and seven of her cousins, the current custodians of this inherited wing of the palace—family friends of the architect, and quietly confident that she would understand what the place truly needed.
Architectural Digest •

Inside a 10,000-square-foot holiday home in Kullu where the hills set the brief

Nestled deep within the forested expanse of Tirthan Valley, this home in Kullu began not with a blueprint, but with a walnut tree. Long dried up, standing as a silent sentinel to the valley’s changing seasons, it was the first thing entrepreneur Kanishk Gupta and his mother, Mrinalini, noticed when they stepped into the little Himalayan dell they would ultimately purchase.
Architectural Digest •

This bungalow in Bengaluru is a joyful nod to its owners’ ancestral home

The courtyard quickly becomes the heart of the home, both spatially and emotionally. It is framed by antique wooden pillars reclaimed from the clients’ ancestral house—elements Padmam treated not merely as structure, but as storytellers. “They carried memory,” she notes, “and it felt important that that memory wasn’t just preserved, but lived with.” Installing the pillars, however, was far from plainsailing, for their original proportions had to be carefully adapted to suit the height and struct...
Architectural Digest India •

This Kerala home enlivens an ancient legend for two sisters and their families

For the sisters, this was no distant myth. The 70-cent plot where their new Kerala home would rise sheltered the very tree under which Makkom and her children had once sought refuge. For centuries, the kavu—the sacred grove on this land—hosted the annual theyyam ritual before it was eventually moved to a nearby temple. The tree was more than a relic; it was a living testament, a guardian of memory and reverence. Designing the home, then, became an act of protection—a duty passed on to Kishor and...
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