Home About Contact

Livingetc

Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Designing in the Dark

The call came from Hong Kong. The clients—well travelled, quietly assured, with homes across multiple cities—wanted their Mumbai apartment designed by SHROFFLEóN and handed back to them fully complete. There would be no extended back-and-forth, no iterative reviews, no site visits. A single phone conversation would set the course; after that, the architects would be left to their own devices. In fact, the first time Kayzad Shroff and María León would meet the homeowners in person would be on the day the project was finished.
Livingetc •

[Print] COVER STORY / Karur: The Art of Almost

If there’s one thing architect Rose Thampy of Kochi-based Edom Architecture has learned over the years, it’s that the unplanned often has a better sense of proportion than anything over-determined. Her latest project—a renovation of a bare-shell duplex apartment in Karur, Tamil Nadu—proves the point. The commission wasn’t exactly on her bingo card, and what began one way soon became something else entirely, with the design evolving much like the brief itself—unexpectedly, but all the better for it.
Livingetc •

[Print] COVER STORY / Chennai: Everyone's a Character

Before you notice the timber coffered ceiling, you'll probably spot the wrestlers. Or perhaps the women carrying trishuls. Or the group of village women gathered on a dhurrie, facing a moss-green Chesterfield dotted with ivory cushions. In this 3,800 sq ft apartment in Chennai's Nungambakkam neighbourhood – designed by Kochi studio Build Beyond – every room introduces a new cast of characters. They appear in paintings, murals, and collected artworks throughout, offering glimpses into the lives, travels, and memories of its owners, Balraj and Preetha.
Livingetc •

[Print] Chennai: Quietly Does It

bove the dining table in
a Poes Garden, Chennai
home, floats a sculptural
light that looks like it’s
drifted in from a fairy tale.
Part chimney, part cloud
– entirely unfazed by the attention. Getting
it up there, though, required every bit of it.
As Amrita Thomas of Chennai-based Alara
Studio puts it, the piece by Arjun Rathi
arrived in bits, like an oversized jigsaw,
and had to be assembled on site with a fair
amount of coaxing – and, one imagines, a
few deep breaths. “When it finally came
together, there was a collective sigh of relief
– and the distinct sense that the room had
been waiting for it all along,” she says of the
installation.
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.”
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Diamond in the Rough

Whoever said diamonds are a girl’s best friend—the whoever being Marilyn Monroe—clearly never met Ekta Parekh or Maithili Raut. Or, for that matter, their fellow co-founder Rajiv Parekh, who’ll tell you that the three architects behind Mumbai-based reD are far more fascinated by diamond cutters than diamonds. Take their latest adventure: an 11,000-square-foot duplex in Mumbai’s Worli, stitched together from two apartments stacked one atop the other. The challenge? Connecting the units without losing access to the upper-level, sea-facing balcony. Ambitious, yes—but so were the architects. What began as a routine structural check soon turned into a full-blown diamond-cutting escapade, opening the slab and carving a discreet, hidden passage from two rooms to the balcony.
Livingetc •

[Print] Bangalore: Soul from Spain

Architects Sridevi Changali and Rosie Paul like to believe they can bite off as much as they can chew. But when help comes wagging, they seldom say no—as they discovered on their last project, when a neighbourhood streetie joined the team uninvited, turning up daily for site inspections. “He must have been an architect in his past life,” quips Sridevi—from somewhere along the Spanish coast, no less. Because while Casa 503 might have been located in Bengaluru, its soul, like its owners’, belonged to blue waters and golden shores somewhere across the Atlantic.
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Vintage Vignettes

There’s something quietly enchanting about old homes—the way they hold the fading light, let time settle into their walls and let every creak sound like a memory finding its way back. But ask any designer who’s ever revived one, and they’ll confirm that the upsides often equal the downsides. Still, when the home in question has soaring ceilings, stained glass windows, terrazzo floors, and is bathed in coastal light under a canopy of gulmohar trees, designers Aarti Somani and Kruti Sheth of Mumbai-based A&K Design Studio develop a convenient case of selective blindness—to peeling paint, temperamental plumbing, and gravity-defying walls. After all, who can argue with that kind of charm?
Livingetc •

[Print] Jaipur: Memories in Mallorca

On a trip to Mallorca many moons ago, entrepreneur Puneet Sanghi stumbled upon a charming hotel. One half was a heritage fort, the other a contemporary addition – a postcard from the past, perfectly stamped into the present. “That really sparked the concept,” says Puneet of his family home in Jaipur, which he shares with his brother, Ambrish, their respective wives, Shweta and Devyani, and their children. As fourth-generation automobile entrepreneurs, the brothers’ careers had taken them across the world, shaping not only their outlook but, over the years, their home as well.
Livingetc •

[Print] Trichy: Dream Come True

Most nights, architect Gayatri Gunjal drifts into a recurring dream, floating high amidst the clouds. In that quiet, suspended world, the edges of reality blur: city streets shrink below her, buildings dissolve into mist, and all that remains is light, air and an unshakable sense of freedom. It is a space where ideas take shape before they exist on paper, where structures breathe and move, and where the founder and principal of Chennai-based Yellowsub Studio feels both weightless and grounded, as if the sky itself is guiding her hand.
A few years ago, that dream edged its way into Serora, a private residence in Trichy that Gayatri unwittingly conjured from her imagination and brought to life, softening gravity with double-height volumes, creating airy voids that spill sunlight through every level, and translucent screens that filter the sun like drifting clouds. As she puts it, the project was “me getting outside my own head.” Fortuitously, the owners’ vision was scarcely different from her own: they sought a home that felt expansive yet intimate, light yet grounded, a space that enlivened her dreams—and more importantly their own.
Livingetc •

[Print] Kolkata: Out of this World

The thing about interior design, for better or worse, is that it rarely treads the middle ground – clients either love it or loathe it. When interior designer Ajay Arya, founder and principal of Kolkata-based A Square Designs, was tasked with transforming a 7,000 sq ft bare-shell duplex on the city’s coveted Loudon Street for Rashmi and Vishal Saraogi, a couple in their forties, he had little inkling of just how swiftly the verdict – or verdicts – would swing in his favour. “Their daughter developed a keen interest in interior design,” says the aesthete – so keen, in fact, that she chose it as her field of study, even going on to intern with Ajay’s firm.
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: 'Tis the Season by Chestnut Storeys

How do you maximise the views in a sea-facing home? You minimise everything else. At least that’s what conventional wisdom will have you believe. But if you know a thing or two about Farah Agarwal, you know the word conventional isn’t part of her vocabulary. When the Chennai-based interior designer and founder of multidisciplinary design practice Chestnut Storeys was entrusted to design a three-level penthouse by the sea, the first thing she did was dial up the colour. “Not all the way, mind you—just enough to rival the views and fulfil the clients’ caveat of no neutrals,” continues the designer, who is widely known for her minimalist signature. “The real question, then, was how much colour was too much colour?”
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Palace in the Sky by Essajees Atelier

From the moment they first set foot inside, Ashwin and Bhagyashree Damera knew there was no mistaking the good vibes. “There was just something about the place. And in terms of the space and floor plan, it was everything we were looking for,” says Bhagyashree of the duplex the couple now calls home. But what it enjoyed in proportions, it certainly lacked in personality. And not just any kind, but the kind they'd experienced as children, in the homes of their parents and grandparents, and come to recognise as adults as the hallmark of an abundant home.
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: World of Pos-sea-bilities

There are few places in Mumbai that look quintessentially un-Mumbai, and AVN Interiors’s latest work of art, a seafront Juhu apartment, is one of them. “I remember stepping inside for the first time and just standing there, taking in the view. Gone was the hustle and bustle of the city. Instead, all I could see was the sea rolling into the horizon. And I thought, how can we even match that picture postcard view?” says Aditi Vora Nair, founder and principal of the Mumbai-based interior design studio.
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Silver Linings Playbook

María Isabel Jiménez León and Kayzad Shroff have an uncanny knack for making the best of a bad bargain. Even if said bad bargain is followed by another, and then another. When the architects and co-founders of Mumbai-based multidisciplinary studio SHROFFLEóN took up the re(design) reins for an apartment on Mumbai’s Pedder Road, they couldn't have imagined the unlikely challenges that would follow. For one, a global pandemic. But also, a crumbling building, an overzealous building manager, and a Vincenzo de Cottis dining table that would refuse to fit through the lift. “Whatever could go wrong, did,” jokes Kayzad. But there were some exceptions, including an interior that took on a life of its own, thanks to some clever sleights of hand and elements that were at once dark and light, easy and elevated, dramatic and discrete.
Livingetc •

[Print] Mumbai: Between Stroke and Sea

Interior designer Shabnam Gupta recalls many details from that first visit, but none more distinctly than the view that greeted her when she stepped inside. “We were enthralled,” recalls the founder and principal of The Orange Lane of the skyrise Mumbai apartment in question. “We could see the city, the mangroves and the sea. It was a 180-degree view.” What she also saw, in due course, was the potential to mirror that magic indoors. The clients, a well-travelled couple with a young child, had a sizeable art collection—one so impressive that Shabnam saw an opportunity to match, if not surmount, the vista by giving it equal pride of place.
Livingetc •

[Print] Cover Story // Kozhikode: Water Under the Bridge

About fourteen kilometres east of Kozhikode, atop a knoll in the leafy town of Kunnamangalam, is a home that appears suspended between water and sky. And yet, its state of levitation, curious as it is, isn’t merely physical. It’s a metaphorical halfway point between people and place, nature and nest, that still, somehow, feels whole. “The owners already had two homes but wanted this one to be different, with an open layout and traditional elements, and water bodies and greenery on either side of the threshold,” says Sham Salim, one half of Kozhikode-based multidisciplinary practice aslam.sham architects. “So it made sense to take cues from the landscape,” finishes the firm’s other half, Aslam Karadan. And so they did.
Livingetc •

[Print] Ambala: So Chocolatey!

A cinnamon-speckled stairway. Eclair-like pillars. Decadent chocolate-slab walls that melt away into oblivion. These are the things that define one residence in Ambala. And yet, the home’s gastronomic allusions aren’t the only things worth noting. Its volumes rise and fall and rise again, in big brutalist sweeps, signalling something new around every corner. “By incorporating a sense of architectural movement, we wanted to inspire a spirit of homeliness and have the home hold a mirror to its evolving inhabitants,” says Sanjay Arora, one half of father-and-son architecture and interior design consultancy Renesa Design Studio, who was tasked with designing the home for a family of four along with the firm’s other half, Sanchit.
Livingetc •

[Print] Kolkata: Something Nice from London

Brothers Swastic and Satwic Ruia have always had an appreciation for the finer things in life, although theirs is a brand of quiet luxury that teeters on minimalist. Their home in Kolkata’s Ballygunge, a two-storey bungalow they share with their families, is a shining example. Designed like a modern English apartment, with vanilla cream tones, classic moulding and gilt-edged accents, it’s a postcard from Mayfair that the Ruias have no plans of returning (nor do they need to). “The brief was short—to keep things simple and timeless,” say the brothers, who enlisted principals Shivani Ajmera and Disha Bhavsar, and team members Parth Shah and Govind Jangid, of Mumbai-based Quirk Studio for the interior design, giving them free rein over the creative process.
Livingetc •

[Print] Ahmedabad: House of Curves

No matter who the client or what the brief, architects Jwalant and Kanika Mahadevwala, co-founders and principals of Ahmedabad-based andblack design studio, always find a way off the beaten path. Their latest project, an apartment on Ahmedabad’s Ambli Bopal Road, is no exception. With undulating wooden screens, amorphous lighting fixtures and furniture that mimics the movement of water, the interior flows like a meandering river, turning unexpectedly around every corner.
Livingetc •

[Print] California: Candy-Coloured Oasis

In California’s Yucca Valley, where dry deserts lord over the land, colour can be hard to come by. For anyone but Leah Ring. “My personality is very bright and I love bold colours,” says the designer and principal of Los Angeles-based interior design studio Another Human. Her 1000-square-foot desert home, designed as a pied-à-terre for herself and her husband, artist Adam de Boer, is proof. An eye-popping kaleidoscope of colour, there are no two rooms alike.
Livingetc •

[Print] Bangalore: Home is Where the Heart Is

Few places hold a candle to the beauty of Coorg. Fewer still equal it in spirit. And yet, one penthouse in the green bylanes of Bengaluru’s Cooke Town is an exception on both counts. With verdant pocket gardens, plenty of timber and stone, and a decidedly breezy air, the interior is a considered reimagination of a traditional Coorg plantation home and a reflection of the owners' Kodava heritage. The present-day version, however, is a fairly recent occurrence. When the homeowners, both lawyers, acquired it a few years ago, its thirty-year-old bones were in desperate need of restoration. In a bid to help them revive the place, and to make it slightly more liveable, they tapped interior designer Vinithra Amarnathan, founder and principal of Bengaluru-based design studio Weespaces, but not before presenting her with a shortlist of images capturing the wonders of their native land.
Load More