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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

Architectural Digest •

This Kochi bungalow is a 5,500-square-foot perfect picture of Eden

Being an interior designer is being a jack of all trades, but being the master of one—above all else—is what architects Dhiya Anna Charley and Thomas Joseph deem their trump card. “The art of balance!” declare the Kochi-based co-founders of studio Design Narrative—referring to the Herculean task of ensuring that each client feels equally valued and appreciated, even when said clients are husband and wife.“They had very different perspectives when it came to design. Nikin loved the charm and char...
Design Anthology •

A New Era of International Design Begins at Mumbai’s Nilaya Anthology — Design Anthology

A few years ago, the idea of a 10,000-square-metre design experience centre in a megalopolis like Mumbai might have seemed overly ambitious, but Mumbai-based architect Rooshad Shroff and client Asian Paints saw it as an opportunity to challenge the city’s spatial norms and reimagine how design could be experienced, shared and celebrated at scale. In designing Nilaya Anthology, India’s first-of-its-kind global luxury design showroom, Shroff has transformed a former mill into a whimsical retail wo...
Architectural Digest •

Tour a Massachusetts Home With a Tropical Modern Flair

Some days, driving home from work, Sashya Thind still has to pinch herself at the sight of the little house on the hill. “I love seeing it up there, glowing in the evening light,” says the Massachusetts-based interior designer, who admits the Weston home almost wasn’t meant to be. “We had put in an offer on another recently renovated house, but something about it just didn’t feel like us. We walked away from that, and luckily, this gem came on the market a few weeks later. We all fell in love wi...
Architectural Digest •

This home in Mumbai is a study in universal energy, happily balancing calm and colour

The tour de force, indubitably, is the bar unit, which cosplays as a coffee station by day. “It’s supposed to, anyway,” chuckles Vakharia. “But during testing, we discovered that someone—not naming names—had already stocked it with wine…at 10 AM. Efficiency at its finest!” Moonshine aside, both designers agree that it’s the art that brings the maximum pizzazz. “The artscape is an ode to their wedding at Jim Corbett National Park. There are prints of white Bengal tigers, silhouetted abstractions...
The Local Project •

Southampton Residence by Clive Lonstein and William A. Schulz

In a town characterised by its coastal homes, Lonstein was keen to embrace a different aesthetic lexicon. “Shifting away from a more expected beach-centric aesthetic and instead drawing inspiration from the surrounding greenery meant that every material and design choice had to complement the natural environment rather than compete with it,” he says. The studio used the serenity of the outdoors as a natural point of departure, achieving a warm yet sophisticated atmosphere by layering organic mat...
Architectural Digest •

This beach house in Chennai channels the soul of a Greek island

Someone once said that the ultimate luxury is time, but that someone, insists interior designer Manmeet Arora, had probably never lived by the sea. If there’s one thing the founder and principal of the Goa-based LOC Design House has firmly come to learn since moving from Mumbai to Goa during COVID, it’s that living by the coast can be good for the soul—so good, in fact, that you might consider never leaving, unless it involves travelling to another coastline just as special.In Arora’s case, that...
The Local Project •

Maddison Apartment by Studio Johnston

Nestled within a 1980s complex in Sydney’s Redfern, Maddison Apartment by Studio Johnston sheds its past for a luminous, modern transformation. Designed by the studio’s project director and head of interiors, Stefania Reynolds, for her own family, the ground-floor home reflects a delicate balance between nostalgia and practicality, drawing inspiration from her Greek childhood while catering to the everyday needs of her husband and their two young children.
For Reynolds, an architect and artist,...
Architectural Digest •

This Hyderabad home is a sun-drenched oasis grown from the earth

For Vamshidhar and Mounica, the only true reference point for sustainable building is traditional wisdom, “particularly the vernacular architecture and construction techniques prevalent in South India,” Mounica notes. This informed the use of lime flooring, resourceful employment of local soil and materials, and a Madras terrace roof. “The aim was to blend traditional knowledge with modern ingenuity to create a home that is both environmentally responsible and aesthetically harmonious,” Vamshidh...
Architectural Digest •

This Kochi home is the ultimate cocoon of calm

Architect Dhiya Anna Charley isn't the tardy type, but there was hardly a day last summer when she didn’t arrive at The Lofts, Kochi, to find her client already settled comfortably on the sofa. “Liya would usually arrive a little early and quietly settle into one of the living room setups,” she says of the Kochi furniture store—formerly a residence—which she had designed in 2020 and where, in the following months, she would come to know Liya George. “The store was a renovated home, styled with a...
Architectural Digest •

Inside an Austin Bungalow That’s Part Groovy, Part Grandpa-Chic

Randall Mays, businessman, investor, and philanthropist, knows how to throw a good party—if your idea of a party involves meditating on grass under open skies (the kind you sit on, not smoke). Interior designer Christina Simon of her eponymous Austin studio can attest to Mays’s definition, having had a hand in transforming his circa-1915 bungalow in Travis Heights, Austin, into a space that’s grandpa-chic by day and trippy by night. “It serves as a lively venue for hosting parties during SXSW an...
Architectural Digest •

This Mumbai apartment is an oasis of beige, black, and burnt vermillion

Maybe it’s because they studied in Mumbai and began working in Ahmedabad, but Salia and Shah both believe that arriving at a design language for the Mumbai apartment was challenged by their cross-city beginnings. “Both the cities sit at very different ends of the design spectrum—Mumbai with its fast pace, layered density, and evolving style; Ahmedabad with its slower rhythm, deep-rooted material culture, and quiet modernism. Bridging these contrasting sensibilities meant unlearning and relearnin...
Architectural Digest •

This architecture studio’s 450-square-foot Pune office is a monolithic masterpiece

In another life, architects Chetan Lahoti and Anand Deshmukh of Pune-based Mind Manifestation Design might just have mastered the runway. “The kind with models, not planes,” Deshmukh says cheekily, pointing to the studio’s new 450-square-foot office extension in Pune. Except, if the sculptural staircase inside is anything to go by, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that’s the real showstopper. “It’s an art piece that really brings the whole space together,” nods Lahoti, adding that it’s also slight...
Architectural Digest •

This bungalow in Ahmedabad effortlessly grows out of the landscape

“From the outset, we wanted a home that was simple, in harmony with nature, and a step towards sustainable living,” says Vibha, a development sector professional. So, by the time she and Naivik, an entrepreneur, reached out to Ahmedabad-based andblack design studio—whom they discovered through mutual friends—their brief was more or less set in stone, albeit the kind of stone that the principals Kanika and Jwalant Mahadevwala had the potential to re-sculpt.As the architects saw it, the home had t...
The Local Project •

Finely Crafted Decorative Mouldings by Intrim

Established in 1987 as a timber stairs manufacturer, Intrim has since emerged as a pacesetter in the world of bespoke timber mouldings, collaborating with architects, interior designers and builders to provide perfectly matched moulding. Over the years, Intrim’s identity has evolved to encompass a range of finely crafted timber mouldings. The company’s portfolio includes an assortment of skirting boards, intricate wall panelling, ornate architraves and elegant wainscoting that can be tailored to...
Architectural Digest •

This bungalow in Raipur is inspired by the jungle huts of Kanha

You know the adage—you can take people out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the people. “Or maybe you don’t know it,” chuckles architect Rishabh Jain of Raipur-based MY MAATI, who takes full credit—no less—for coining the saying himself. As for the inspiration behind it, he concedes that credit goes to his clients: a travel enthusiast and a wildlife explorer.Longing for a home reminiscent of the outdoors, the couple had a precise brief—to take them back, at least in spirit, to the...
Architectural Digest •

This Bengaluru home embraces breathtaking views and the beauty of craftsmanship

This meant nothing picture-perfect or precious. As for what that looked like, “we had no idea,” Mandadi chuckles. “Like most people, we started with Pinterest boards, drawn to bits and pieces of mid-century modern, wabi-sabi, and minimalism, but nothing really felt like ‘us’,” she says of the process. It might have been a dead end if not for interior and furniture designer Anisha Chandy of her namesake Bengaluru-based studio, whom they found on Instagram and who mercifully stepped in to help the...
Vogue •

Priya Mani’s food encyclopedia may have originated in Denmark but it has the warmth of a desi kitchen

When Mani and her husband, Vinay Venkatraman, her batchmate from the National Institute of Design and the co-founder of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, moved to the Danish capital in 2007, she took to recreating the dishes of her childhood, first as hearty meals for guests, and afterwards, as soul food for her own children. One day, inspired by the book The Illustrated Foods of India by KT Achaya, she started documenting them. “Like many other parents living in a diasporic commun...
The Local Project •

Upper East Side Apartment by Studio Nicholas Obeid

The play on dichotomies extends to geometry and compositions. Obeid tends to explore scale and asymmetry, creating dynamic programs that bring infinite visual interest. This is illustrated well in the living room, where a skinny table lamp with a delicate metal frame stands on a tall timber cabinet to one side of the room, and on the other, a shorter timber plinth houses a brutalist-esque sculpture beside a floor lamp with a weighty shade. A pair of vintage Pierre Legrain armchairs sourced from...
Vogue •

Rujuta Diwekar’s new book is all about intuitive eating with ghar ka khana at its core

When Rujuta Diwekar hands over the gift tucked under her arm, she doesn’t make a show of it. Instead, she quietly unties the bag in her lap and opens it for Sudha Murty. When Murty dips her hand into the bag, it surfaces with a heap of hand-pounded rice which, as I later learn, grows only in rainwater and forest streams and was cultivated on Diwekar’s ancestral farm near Palghar, Maharashtra. Then, in true ghar ka khana spirit, Murty—an educator, author, and philanthropist—offers Diwekar a glass...
Architectural Digest •

This Dubai apartment is a contemporary nod to its owners’ roots in Kerala

For any couple, the real litmus test of compatibility is designing a home together. Ashish Jose and Meera Sunny Ashish are living proof. “Never before, never again,” jokes Meera about their experience of designing their Dubai apartment, which she confirms was a crash course in patience, negotiation, and the fine art of pretending to like each other’s questionable décor choices. “From the very start, Ashish and I had completely opposite reactions to certain design choices. If our marriage survive...
Vogue •

[Digital Cover] Sobhita Dhulipala and Naga Chaitanya Akkineni’s home life is not what you’d expect

Besides sharing a native tongue and a career in film, Sobhita Dhulipala and Naga Chaitanya Akkineni had little in common. He lived in Hyderabad; she was based out of Mumbai. He grew up in Chennai; she was raised in Visakhapatnam. And perhaps most telling of all—he followed her on Instagram, but she didn’t follow him back. “I found out during an Ask Me Anything,” she recalls, referring to Instagram’s question-box feature. “I was sifting through the questions when I saw one that asked, ‘Why aren’t...
Architectural Digest •

This Mumbai apartment feels like a cottage straight out of a still life painting

The thing about designing a Mumbai apartment is that they all tend to blur together—matchbox layouts, builder-grade flooring, and endless sprawls of concrete stretching in every direction. Interior designer Shraddha Shah, however, has never seen it that way. Arguably, the closest she ever came to designing two in the same breath was when she landed projects, several months apart, in the same building—allowing her to shuttle between site meetings in a record three minutes flat. “False,” chuckles the founder and principal of Mumbai-based Olive Roof, dismissing the notion of sameness. “If anything, it took us longer to nail the layout of the second one. The initial plan from the builder was 100% impractical, and I had to sketch and re-sketch to get the zoning right.” But iteration after iteration wasn’t in vain—because as she tells it, the result, fortuitously, was a blueprint stripped of clutter and brimming with soul.
Architectural Digest •

AD Small Spaces: This Bengaluru apartment is a soulful escape where the light never leaves

Interior designer Shweta Arya Malaviya speaks to the sun—sometimes at sunrise, sometimes at dusk. But never does a day pass when she doesn’t at all. As she explains, there’s something special about pausing to take in its light—and listen as it speaks back in gilded corners, coffee table reflections, and luminous layouts. “It’s my most trusted collaborator,” she muses. If her last project, a 950-square-foot apartment in Bengaluru’s Whitefield, is anything to go by, you know she isn’t wrong. “It’s...
Architectural Digest •

This luminous apartment in Pune is a wabi-sabi wonderland

In embracing wabi-sabi for this apartment in Pune, Rohra didn’t overlook other considerations, not least the importance of making the home comfortable for all five family members—the couple themselves, Avinash’s mother, and their two daughters. “The main challenge was designing a comfortable space for a child with special needs—eliminating sharp edges, fragile elements, and harsh surfaces, including fabrics, while ensuring all safety measures were met,” she avers, noting that the goal was to kee...
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AD Visits

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