Sometimes you take a liking to a particular magazine, website, tune that you keep flipping/playing it over and over again. There is no formula to decipher this fondness; it just clicks and stays in the head space for days, sometimes weeks. That’s how it is with AD for me now. I’ve compiled five of the most interesting homes on AD in 2016. They all share a recurring theme: minimalist, have an abundance of wood to bring in the warmth, a flood of natural light, open spaces, embracing the outdoors, and a liberal use of white. Imran Qureshi and Aisha Khalid’s light-filled, minimalist home Some of the elements I fell in love with in this house: the staircase, the nee tree, burma teak furniture, and the part where Imran says that everyone owned this project. It was interesting to ask your contractors to flip through magazine pages to get a sense…
A review of Siemens dishwasher and if it is useful for Indian dishes and kadais
Editor’s Note: ** Updated in 2019 for relevancy** I have been reviewing every service provider that we have worked with over the course of moving into our new home. This one has been long pending. Circa 2015. One lazy Sunday afternoon in July. Someone sent me the link to Furdo. First reactions: the concept was novel; the theme names were catchy; designs interesting, and cost reasonable. Furdo Pricing and When did I avail their service? July 2015: One thing led to another, we decided on the theme and signed up for their design at a cost of Rs.11,400 including service tax by that evening. The team got in touch with us over the next couple of days, asked a few questions to formulate our expectations and understand design sense better. The theme I bought: New Ethnic. How did Furdo work (then): Choose a theme from the available themes.They visit the house, customer…
Walls. Walls. Walls. When it comes to dressing up a home, walls take precedence over everything else. The possibilities are endless for wall as a canvas: a fresh coat of paint with the color of the season, a wall paper, a collage, an over-sized art work, graffiti, doodling on the wall, decal or color blocking. Doors have always fascinated me. I love doors that are painted yellow, blue – they are showstoppers like no other. I wanted to do something different for the entrance of my son’s room: on the door, of course. My inspiration for the door came from here. This is a beautiful work of Switch Over Studio. My son has been a huge fan of the Peanuts since he was five. So I knew the entrance to his room should have some representation of that. Ta da..and I came up with this. This is how the door…
Someone recently asked me to recommend a place to buy a queen size bed. It’s been a while since I have bought furniture from a brick-and-mortar store. All the furniture for our new home came were bought online: some great experiences and some we will regret forever. What makes all the difference It’s not just the designs, quality, and price that make the difference; for me customer service experience has to be good. In that area, Urban Ladder wins hands down. Been a customer ever since they started. Pepperfry comes a distant second mainly because their delivery and assembling process is not streamlined and haphazard. Though I have had good experience with Pepperfry for smaller items. Insaraf – wouldn’t recommend even though they have good designs and we ended up buying a dining table (with scratches) and a poster bed for the the master bed room (delivered in damaged condition…
How is the weather in your part of the world? The days are sunny and the nights are cold, here in Bangalore. My son is under the weather for the past three days. So post lunch, we pulled ourselves to the terrace to soak in the winter sun while I passed on some TLC to the plants, and he started feeling much better. Nothing beats these simple pleasures of life….. Our terrace can do with pops of color and some facelift…maybe a painted door, window and more flowering pots. While scouring for ideas on the Houzify app, I realized a good 30 minutes later that I had bookmarked 9 favorites each representing one room. There you go, if you are in the process of doing up your home, here is your design genie. Sharing the jaw-dropping pictures that inspired me…and hoping you find yours, too. Let’s start with the foyer…
This is not a sponsored post. If there is one piece in our home that has our signatures stamped in its design, then it has to be the bookshelf. The piece sits majestically in the first floor living. This post is a story of how the bookshelf got crafted. My husband was particular he wanted something different and what he wanted. I couldn’t do justice to the design he wished for in entirety, but this is half-way there. We used many free tools along the way to convey our ideas in 3D. The one we used for the bookshelf was from Hem. Idea modular boxes that can be moved around any which way you liked. NOT to have a standard floor to wall cupboard sorta bookshelf with partitions in between. large enough to hold our library and books bought in future interspersed with artifacts. Design We designed the entire house…
Another gem from AD that celebrates the courtyard. Courtyard is that one coveted element of architecture of the bygone era we would all like to hold dear. You can see the courtyard making a comeback in many individual homes with different interpretations. For centuries, it has been known by different names in different parts of the subcontinent, some call it mittham, wada, nallukettu etc.The idea remains the same: it is the central area around which the other parts of the house are constructed. The architectural element of the courtyard worked well for the joint family setup of the past where in every family had a room/kitchen to themselves and gathered around the courtyard for functions/festivals and generally to hang around. everything revolved around this focal point. The modern interpretations of the courtyard are executed brilliantly in these homes. Our ancestral home in Kumbakonam had an open courtyard which was converted into…
Gross alert: there’s a lot of stomach-churning description in this post. So, in jest, please be warned that this is not for the faint-hearted. this post talks about how to remove hard water scales and shine your bathrooms with one awesome product. Bonus: No elbow grease. Strands of hair. Ewwww…. Lime scale build up. Not a pretty sight. Discolored tiles: disgusting! Dirty foot marks. Gross and wet. Slimy! Not a tough one to guess what part of the house you will be cleaning today. Today, as we clean one of the nastiest parts of the house, I realize this is also one I find the most pleasure in after it is done. One of the delights of a vacation is to wake up each morning to a shining bathroom, and someone else does the cleaning. How nice! My latest fetish is to see the professionals in action as they clean the bathrooms time and again. First, when…
8:45 p.m. on 8th Nov. 2016. I was drawing the curtains on our bed room, and picking a book from my bedside table to read later that night. The phone was ringing repeatedly downstairs; it was my dad calling frantically to relay the historic news of 500 and 1000 notes being no longer accepted. Only a few minutes ago, the husband had communicated the same. Mom was smart; I learn the next morning she had asked dad not to get worked up knowing very well I wouldn’t be carrying more than 1,500 in cash at any point in time. She was right! This scene must have played out in million other homes across the country; the only difference being we slept in peace just as any other night without worrying how to exchange/account for wads of notes stashed in lockers, for there was none. I’m quite infamous amongst people who…