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Architectural Digest India •

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

Architect Amrutha Kishor of Elemental isn’t one to believe in folklore—but if her latest Kerala home project taught her anything, it is to rethink where myth ends and meaning begins. “During our first meeting, our clients had an interesting story to tell,” Kishor recalls, referring to sisters Rekha Utham, based in Bahrain, and Renu Krishnadas, based in Dubai, along with their respective husbands and children. “The scope of work was not merely to design a holiday home on their ancestral land wher...
Architectural Digest •

This home in Bengaluru has a soul straight from Chikamagalur

All that effort wasn’t without reason—nor without a clear vision. From the outset, homeowners Rakhee and Ravindra Mysore knew not only how they wanted the house to look, but how they wanted it to feel: warm, grounded, and evocative of the landscape that shaped them. As a fifth-generation coffee planter who had spent as much time away from the Ghats as amidst them, Ravindra hoped for a home that could hold both worlds with grace. “They imagined something beautiful, but still deeply connected to n...
Architectural Digest •

This home in Kerala’s Kolanchery is a tranquil landing pad for its Kuwait-based owners

For the longest time, Kuwait-based Twiggy and Deepa Abraham’s trips home to Kolanchery, Kerala, a small town just 20 kilometres east of Kochi, meant being hosted by a revolving door of cheerful relatives. But somewhere along the way—2024, to be precise—they found themselves longing for a different kind of door: one that opened and shut on their terms, one they could truly call their own. “We’d been living abroad for a while and had always dreamed of having a holiday home in India that felt like...
Architectural Digest •

In Bengaluru, Hundredhands transformed a 150-year-old school into a cultural centre

Buildings that have reverberated with the voices of multiple generations carry a quiet magic—a magic that lingers long after those voices have faded. Architect Bijoy Ramachandran, of multidisciplinary design practice Hundredhands, knows this to be true, as he also knows that it can take time to uncover this magic. “We had to look deep,” he says of Sabha, the studio’s maiden conservation and adaptive reuse project. The initiative was helmed by civic evangelist and former honorary director of the Bangalore International Centre, V Ravichandar. “He and his wife, Hema, had started a family trust, and were interested in restoring a colonial-era school in Bengaluru’s Cantonment [area] and reimagining it as a hub for artistic expression,” explains Ramachandran, who worked closely with cultural strategist Raghu Tenkayala. “He [Tenkayala] played an instrumental role in bringing together the RBANM’s Educational Charities—to which the school once belonged—and Ravi’s [Ravichandar’s] family trust.”
Architectural Digest •

From erstwhile school to a haven for artistic endeavours, a 150-year-old Bengaluru landmark gets a second life

Buildings that have reverberated with the voices of multiple generations carry a quiet magic—a magic that lingers long after those voices have faded. Architect Bijoy Ramachandran of the multidisciplinary design practice Hundredhands knows this to be true, as he also knows that sometimes, that magic can take time to uncover. “We had to look deep,” he says of Sabha, the studio’s maiden conservation and adaptive reuse project. The initiative was helmed by civic evangelist and former honorary director of the Bangalore International Centre, V. Ravichandar, with whom Ramachandran had previously collaborated. “He and his wife, Hema, had started a family trust and were interested in restoring a Colonial-era school in Bengaluru’s Cantonment and reimagining it as a hub for artistic expression,” explains Ramachandran, who worked closely with cultural strategist Raghu Tenkayala on the project. “He played an instrumental role in bringing together the RBANM Educational Charities, to which the school once belonged, and Ravi’s family trust.”
Architectural Digest •

In This Bay Area Midcentury Home, a Wall-to-Wall Headboard Connects Two Queen Beds

Once the walls were swapped for windows, arranging the furniture became a challenge. “We spent ages fine-tuning the furniture plan,” says Cheung, who experimented with multiple layouts and lighting schemes in collaboration with Tucci Lighting. The team finally landed on a sculptural curved sofa paired with flexible seating that can easily pivot—perfect for taking in the garden one moment and the TV the next. “The layout moves with the seasons,” she adds. “In December, for example, the furniture...
Architectural Digest •

Open Shelving Divides This Interior Stylist’s Brooklyn Apartment Into Subtle Zones—and Shows Off Her Travels

If there’s one thing Brittany Albert believes to be true, it’s the quiet power of manifestation. After all, there’s nothing else that could explain how her Brooklyn apartment—the parlor floor of a brownstone—came to be, and how the stars aligned, if only momentarily, when the previous tenants moved out. “We were renting an apartment a few floors above in the same building, and had seen this unit with its outdoor space and beautiful bay windows. When it became available, we jumped at the chance,”...
Architectural Digest •

This Halloween, 8 interior designers share their scariest interior design fails

For most interior designers, Halloween doesn’t roll around once a year—it’s an ongoing state of being. Ghosts and ghouls have nothing on vanishing contractors, interior design fails, fabric mishaps, or the occasional client meltdown. Miscommunications form the cobwebs, budget revisions deliver the jump scares, and the real haunted houses are the ones they’re scrambling to finish. Between paint colours that shift overnight and deliveries that never arrive, the design world is rife with horror. Ei...
Architectural Digest •

A designer transformed this 60-year-old office into a serene Chennai home

Interior designer Sunita Yogesh has had so many brushes with fate that she is convinced she was a cat in a past life—“or still is,” quips the interior designer and founder of her namesake Chennai-based studio. No stranger to close calls, she faced her fair share of frightful moments on her latest project, an office converted into a home.At one point, the 1960s roof unexpectedly collapsed over the dining area before work had even begun, and later, removing the false ceiling revealed a sloped, rat...
Architectural Digest •

AD Small Spaces: This 650-square-foot Mulund home has one rule: no straight lines

The owners, Jyoti and Punit Malde, had a longer list of things they didn’t want than things they did. To wit: nothing flashy, nothing too colourful, and certainly nothing fussy or forced. “We wanted it to feel calm, warm, and soulful—a space that instantly makes us feel at ease,” says Jyoti. Their style leaned Japandi, with a love for natural textures, muted tones, warm materials, and those little details that make a space feel lived-in. And the home reflects it beautifully. Softly textured beig...
Architectural Digest •

Inside a Bengaluru home that bridges the gap between both ends of the country

What do you get when a boy from Delhi and a girl from Andhra Pradesh buy a house together? “Total chaos,” grins Chandana Vakulabharanam, the girl in question—evidently not without reason. When the strategy consultant and her Delhi-born husband, entrepreneur Lalith Gudipati, bought A Bengaluru home not too long ago, they knew in their bones that they'd made the right choice.“The way the sunlight streamed in made the entire place feel vibrant and full of energy, and we instantly knew it was meant...
Architectural Digest •

This Bengaluru apartment is a grandmother's gracious gift to a newlywed couple

First homes are always special, but even more so when they come as a wedding gift from your grandmother. “We’d always dreamed of creating a nest of our own, and this home made that possible,” says UI/UX designer Gayathri Nair, speaking of the gift from her grandmother-in-law. Perched on the 14th floor and surrounded by lush greenery, this Bengaluru apartment offered a serene, secluded escape—but as Nair explains, it still needed a touch of personality to truly feel like home.
Architectural Digest •

For its owners, this bougainvillea-draped Bengaluru villa is a long-held dream come true

For most, destiny is written in the stars, but in Mitali Sodhi and Vishwastam Shukla’s case, it bloomed in the bougainvillea. “We knew right away,” says Sodhi of their east Bengaluru villa—situated inside a 15-year-old enclave—whose bougainvillea-draped garden, serendipitously, was a manifestation many years in the making. “I had dreamed about a garden like this for years,” she continues. “So it was almost as if the garden had been waiting for me all along.” For the couple, the decision began and ended there: this was their home—the one where bougainvillea had spilled out of their dreams and taken root in reality.
Architectural Digest •

This holiday home in Kochi is a sunlit ode to Kerala's vernacular

The thing about worshipping the sun, if you're not careful, is that it might reciprocate a tad too emphatically—so emphatically, in fact, that architect Reshma Geordy of Thiruvananthapuram-based The Design Verses, a sun worshipper herself, found herself in something of a predicament not too terribly long ago. “It was a tricky thing,” says Geordy, whose thing in question was creating a tropical sunhouse of sorts, in a land as hot as Kochi. “The question was—how do we create a sun-drenched home without the heat that comes with it?” adds the architect, whose client, Basil Thomas—a Kerala-born, Canada-based engineer who had admittedly resigned himself to a life of icy chill halfway across the world—envisaged a holiday home in Kochi with warm and sunny spaces.
Architectural Digest India •

These Ahmedabad-based architects built a house with “the most beautiful entrance foyer”

Also read: 4 weekend homes in Ahmedabad that are sanctuaries away from the cityThe builder gave carte blanche to the pair, with just one cheeky caveat: “create the most beautiful foyer you’ve ever seen”—and maybe sprinkle in a little history while at it. “We wanted something that spoke the city’s language—not the polished brochure version, but the one tucked away in old pols, behind carved wooden doors and inside quiet inner chowks,” says Jariwala. For her and Kaswala, the foyer wasn’t just an e...
Architectural Digest India •

These Ahmedabad-based architects built a house with “the most beautiful entrance foyer”

Any interior designer will tell you that creating a home that reflects its owners is easy—until the couple disagrees on the sofa. Only, in architect Smeet Kaswala and interior designer Avishi Jariwala’s case, there was no couple, nor any owner. “Not that it makes things any easier,” muses Jariwala, who runs Ahmedabad-based Studio Espaazo with Kaswala. If anything, their ask was even more daunting: to create a model flat for a builder which could serve anyone, a universal archetype without leaning too far into one person’s taste or another’s lifestyle—an apartment that felt aspirational, but never alienating.
Architectural Digest •

Eggs, mushrooms, and flowers in a fantastical shoot by Porus & Prayag, for Nama Home

Photographer Porus Vimadalal enjoys his eggs with a side of furniture for Nama Home. “And my mushrooms too,” quips the Mumbai-based creative director, who used the said protein sources to nourish his latest project with his husband, Prayag Menon: a still life campaign for the metal furniture brand Nama Home. “I was immediately drawn to their design philosophy,” continues Vimadalal, noted for being the imaginative force behind some of India’s most successful photography campaigns, including sever...
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 •

The Designers Behind This Former Georgia O’Keeffe Hangout Only Added Details That Felt Original

All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.As the AD PRO Directory designers quickly realized, the real challenge was exercising tactful restraint. “We’re usually brought in to add architectural details that make a house feel special. This time, the house was the special part. It was more about holding back so the architecture could shine,” notes...
Architectural Digest •

This Coonoor bungalow, aged 80 years, is a colonial revival in the Nilgiris

Maintaining a historic home, like this Coonoor bungalow, is a privilege few receive, but reviving one from the ashes of its past is a privilege even fewer desire. Ajith and Shashi Jhabakh, however, were undeterred. When the Coimbatore-based couple approached architect Sowmya Kumar of OWM Architecture, they weren’t seeking an easy restoration—they wanted to breathe new life into a house that had weathered time, loss, and neglect.Built in the 1940s during the British Raj and passed down through ge...
Architectural Digest •

A California Home Rediscovers its French Contemporary Roots With Cloudlike Details

There was something special about the home’s French Contemporary bones—but there was also something missing. “While Gina and Dan loved the French influences, they really wanted us to emphasize the contemporary aspect—to truly bring the home into the present,” says Sulaiman, who set about creating a warm and inviting oasis—somewhere the family could huddle, kick off their boots, and disappear for a while. And then, just as easily, reemerge and entertain when the mood struck. She didn’t design the...
Architectural Digest •

This 3,500-square-foot coastal villa in Chennai channels Mediterranean magic

The thing that people often forget about architects is their ability to roll with the punches—to expand a room by a few square metres, move a window an inch or two to the left, flip the living room to frame a better view. Or, as in the case of Raghuveer Ramesh and Sharanya Srinivasan, the duo behind Chennai-based Studio Context, do all that—and then decide to promptly not. “We kept doubling every room with each design round. At one point, Sharanya insisted that she’d have to start cutting down t...
Architectural Digest •

Inside BILT Rewards founder Ankur Jain and former WWE wrestler Erika Hammond's home in NYC

Also read: A retired couple’s home in Bengaluru becomes a quiet ode to neoclassicism and memoryThe thing about designing a home for a couple, especially one as creatively distinct as Jain and Hammond—he breathes technology, she’s a former beauty queen and the founder of STRONG by Erika, a boxing-inspired fitness app—is finding a way to hold a mirror to who they are individually, and who they are together. As Mehlre explains, “Ankur and Erika represent the perfect fusion of intellectual sophistic...
Architectural Digest •

This store in Hyderabad is inspired by Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat

If this store in Hyderabad were a movie set, the customers would naturally be the protagonist. “Which is why it had to inspire an atmosphere that makes people feel great about what they are buying,” says Dev. For him, that looked like jharokha-inspired backdrops and dazzling open displays, arranged so as to blur the distinction between merchandise and mise-en-scène—where every sari feels like part of the narrative, not just a product on a rail. Dev puts a finer point on the subject. “Every conve...
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