A Different Language Entirely
I remember the day I said yes to this project.
I knew corporate interiors well. A home asked something different of me — and I was about to find out what.
Offices, boardrooms, reception areas — spaces designed around productivity and impression. I understood that world deeply. Its rhythms, its logic, its particular kind of beauty.
A home is none of those things.
A home is where someone is most themselves. Where the guard comes down. Where life accumulates in small, unglamorous ways — a favourite chair worn soft, a light left on too long, a room that smells like a person even when they're not in it.
And yet here was this family, in Mumbai, handing me their primary residence — the place they would wake up in every morning, eat dinner in every evening, come back to after every hard day — and saying: we trust you completely.
I said yes. And then I went home and sat very quietly for a while.
What nobody tells you about complete freedom
Everyone thinks freedom is the dream brief. No constraints, no fixed ideas, no mood boards thrust at you across a table.
What nobody tells you is that complete freedom means complete authorship. Every choice is yours. Every mistake is yours. And when it's someone's home — their primary home, the centre of their daily life — the weight of that is something you feel in your chest.
I think what saved me was the client.
They were the kind of people who made you want to do your best work. Not because they demanded it — they never did. But because their trust was so genuine, so uncomplicated, that disappointing them felt unthinkable. It wasn't pressure. It was something quieter than that. Something more like responsibility held warmly.