5 of the best Mumbai homes featured in AD

An Art Deco Home in Mumbai That Offers Views To Iconic City Structures, Designed by Annkur Khosla Design Studio

Annkur Khosla was invited on board to redesign the interiors of a fifth-floor apartment in Sunshine, in South Mumbai. Sunshine apartments is itself at quite a cusp. It overlooks the magnificent Oval Maidan with all of civilisation playing cricket in its grounds. The Mantralaya is on its left, standing across is the neo-Gothic High Court building, and the Victorian Gothic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum on the other side. The views from this fifth-floor apartment are a luxury in their own league, leaping across time and architectural styles. Built in the 1920s, Sunshine represents the art deco wave of Bombay, when progressive merchants and entrepreneurs of the time began exploring the flamboyant architectural style and brought it back to their home city. Khosla’s deep dive into deco made perfect timing. When she began working on Sunshine, the revived interest in art deco in Bombay was visibly picking up. “Sunshine was an untouched heritage project, built sometime in the 1920s. It came with its own set of challenges,” she says. “We had to be extremely careful while strengthening the structure. It had to be done incrementally and certainly not like an invasion.” Yet this wasn’t a pure restoration project. It was someone’s home, a husband and wife’s, and it had to be functional and practical and beautiful and simply a home. From the flooring and the custom furniture to the carpet-less carpeting and the way art is mounted—specially commissioned to fit not a flat surface, but a waved wall—is all part of Khosla’s experiments with deco. Art deco was a movement of innovation and breakthroughs from old norms, and Khosla has clearly slipped her own avant-garde ideas into the scheme.

Tarini Jindal’s Sea-Facing Mumbai Home, Designed by Tanya Singh

Tarini Jindal Handa’s sea-facing south Mumbai apartment features a sweeping veranda, which runs across the length of the house, and lets the sunshine pour into the 5,000-square-foot space. When interior architect Tanya Singh first stepped into the apartment a year ago, she immediately knew that the light of the golden hour—which bounces through the area, moving from the dining space, to the living room and the library—would become crucial to the design process. “The first time I visited the apartment, I ended up spending an hour or two walking around the place. Just when the sun set, this incredible rosy light invaded the space, casting everything it touched in a pink haloed glow,” says Singh. For the design, Singh dismantled the false ceiling, instantly increasing the height by a foot, and broke down the walls of the two rooms on either side of the living area, replacing them with sliding glass doors by Rimadesio. To capture the magic of the oblique rays of the afternoon, she asked Milan-based designer Jacopo Foggini to tap into his forte, and translate light into matter. With a cascading tangle of 250 polycarbonate modules—handmade in water, at 280 degrees Celsius—Foggini crafted The Pink Cloud, an installation that tumbles from the ceiling in the dining space. The art that takes pride of place in the apartment is as fresh and unpredictable as the design that surrounds it. In this evolving canvas—that shifts and morphs along with the lives that it contains within the walls—the only constant is the streaking light that filters through the veranda. Here, the rose-tinted light is the conductor; the rest, mere musicians, dancing to its tune.

 

A Home Layered by Old-World Charm, Owned by Priya Aswani

In an upscale residential building is interior and product designer Priya Aswani’s fourth-floor flat, overlaid with old-world elegance encased in a new, albeit timeless aesthetic. And to think it was a fire that started it all. “More than 14 years ago, there was a fire in the flat above ours. That was when I turned [the lower level] into an independent home for myself,” explains Aswani about her 3,300-square-foot home. She designed it with architect Anand Patel—with whom she collaborates on interior design projects as PA Works. They developed a neutral palette, an open-plan layout to give a sense of seamlessness, and back-pedalled into the past, in a sense, to ensure the space resonated with the original architectural intentions of this 1920s building. “Before, it was much more compartmentalised. The idea was to open and brighten it up, let light and ventilation come through, and maintain the integrity of the 1920s building. It has basically been taken back to the original layout, with a few minor changes to suit me,” says Aswani. “The house maintains a neutral classic modernity throughout that allows for almost every style—modern, art deco, classic or eclectic.” But more than that, this apartment suits her in the way that it is infused with memories and expresses the personal history of its homeowner—through the furniture and objects that dot the space.

Vintage Glamour and a View to the World Highlight This Home’s Design, by Mangesh Lungare

In the heart of Bandra, Mumbai is this three-bedroom apartment that combines modern design with old-world glamour. Conceptualised by designer Mangesh Lungare, the apartment reflects the spirit of a holiday home while being in the centre of a bustling city. The space spread over 1,000-square-feet is home to a couple, their daughter and pet cat. The clients wanted a home that was not just well-designed but also a comfortable haven where the family could make memories with loved ones. “Our ethos was to decorate with confidence, to play with materials piece by piece—one thing complimenting another. This contemporary apartment is filled with layers of curiosity and has been sensitively imagined to prioritise family living with ultimate comfort,” says Lungare. The home is enriched with brass accents, customised furniture pieces and a black colour scheme. According to the designer, black has been used to frame spaces and give the home character. Since the apartment is on the seventh floor, the trees outside have been utilised to give the feeling of an extended garden, with window sit-outs provided throughout the apartment for indoor-outdoor integration. “Window sit-outs offer a great sense of interaction into the living and bedroom spaces with natural light and air filtering in,” he says.

An Apartment That’s An Exercise in Practicality, Designed by ShroffLeon

When it comes to designing a home, the most important factors are “knowing who you are designing it for and understanding their personality,” says architect Maria Isabel Jimenez Leon, one half of architecture and interiors firm ShroffLeon. As luck would have it, the philosophy aligns perfectly with this Mumbai project—the client is a cousin of architect Kayzad Shroff, the other half of ShroffLeon. Younger than Shroff by almost a decade, the relationship between the cousins is much like that of blood brothers, which resulted in a largely free hand when it came to the design, as well as the art and furniture. The 1,000-square-feet apartment was housed within an approximately 50-year-old building, which presented some challenges. A majority of the walls within were shear concrete, making any drastic restructuring impossible.  The architects had two advantages though—Shroff had grown up just a few streets away from the building; he had also spent a substantial part of his childhood in this very apartment, which gave him a familiarity with the space, as well as the surrounding areas. From a material perspective, the firm went with the philosophy of less is more, using a palette of subtle colours and refined materials that play off each other like a perfect jazz duet—the flooring’s softly luminous white terrazzo against black ash and fumed larch veneers; the master bedroom’s silky beige marble behind a light metal bookshelf. The harmonies and contrasts flow through the home, creating a space with a modern, contemporary spirit.

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