Journal

A swimming pool is the most expensive thing you can put in a garden and the easiest to get wrong, because most of what determines whether it gets used is decided before any water goes in. Here is what to think about when planning a swimming pool for an Indian home — where it goes, […]

A home gym is one of the few rooms whose success is entirely measurable: either you use it, or you have built an expensive storage room with a mirror. Here is how to plan a home gym that actually gets used — the space you genuinely need, the four things that decide it, and the

The main door is the only element of a house that every single visitor touches. It is also, in most Indian homes, chosen late from a catalogue after the budget has been spent elsewhere. Here is how to get the main door right — size, material, hardware, the Vastu guidance and what it actually means

A duplex or triplex is the only residential type where circulation is the whole design problem. In a flat the plan is a diagram; across two or three levels it becomes a sequence, and the staircase stops being a utility and starts being the building. Here is how to plan a duplex or triplex home

Colour is the decision clients agonise over longest and the one that is cheapest to change. It is also the decision most often made in the wrong place — under showroom lighting, from a 50mm chip, in a different city’s daylight. Here is how to choose a colour palette for an Indian home: how the

The contractor decides whether your design gets built or approximated. You can have a flawless drawing set and a poor contractor, and the house will be poor. The reverse is also true, and more common than people think. Here is how to choose a contractor for interior work — how to find them, what to

Most clients arrive with a folder of saved images and no vocabulary for what connects them. That is entirely normal — and naming the style is less useful than understanding what each one actually requires of a house. Here are the interior design styles that genuinely show up in Indian homes, what each one needs

“Turnkey” is the most used and least defined word in Indian interiors. Every firm offers it, almost none of them mean the same thing by it, and the gap between what a client assumes and what the contract says is where most disputes begin. Here is what turnkey interior design actually means, what it includes

Most of what goes wrong in a home is not a disaster. It is a series of small decisions, each defensible on its own, that add up to a house nobody is quite happy in. And almost all of them are made before anything is built. These are the mistakes we see most often in

Home automation is the easiest thing to oversell and the easiest to regret. Most of what gets installed in Indian homes is used enthusiastically for a month and then abandoned, while the two or three genuinely useful systems were never specified at all. Here is an honest view of home automation — what earns its