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I was thrilled when Better Homes and Gardens approached me to be a part of their Diwali issue. Seeing your name in print gives the thrills that few other things match up to; it’s one of those things that makes you drive across town to pick up a copy and flaunt it on the coffee table. I’m a huge fan of decor and interior magazines and can’t wait for the new issues to arrive by mail the first week every month. Despite the incessant eye-candy on Instagram from varied sources, nothing really lives to the feeling of flipping through a physical magazine lounging on the couch. That feeling is irreplaceable. The issue is packed with festive decor ideas, recipes, shopping recommendations, and style tips Here is a snippet of the pages featuring me alongside bloggers Preethi, Sharon, and Sruthi. Do you still subscribe to magazines? If so, which ones? I’m…

Brief by the client: Imagine a vintage cafe to serve canteen-style finger food and traditional India chai. Retro? Check. Feel of the 50s? Of course. Eerily comfortable and familiar? No doubt. Nostalgia? You bet. I’ve spent the past hour ooh-aahing over this space. Yes, I do swing from my minimalist end of the spectrum to this far extreme if it has an old-world charm to it and is done up every inch in a retro way.  I mean, seriously, what is there not to love about this cafe. These breathtakingly gorgeous pictures are of the 750 sq.ft Karachi Cafe in Gachibowli, Hyderabad. If you have been to Hyderabad, you would have heard and tasted the signature biscuits from Karachi Bakery – the cafe is an outlet from them. The cafe has been designed by Aamir and Hameeda. The devil is in the details and AANDH has done an impeccable job of…

So often you step into homes and wonder if it is someone’s home, or an exhibit of the interior designer’s craft — to be showcased for guests, prospective clients, and magazines. They lack the warmth, personal touch, and comfort. I wonder, “Who gets to make the final call when it comes to the comfort of furniture – the designer or the house’s occupants?” Who decides if the sofa should be white because it matches the rest of the theme and would look great in pictures? What if it’s a pain for to maintain with a continuous flow of guests and dust in the area? What if the vintage furniture is really comfortable to sink my rear into to chat or watch TV? Isn’t it my home after all? But, I see homes after homes lost in this race of trying to be a showpiece. So, you know instantly when spot a…

As you tour new homes, how often have you wondered how much the interiors would have cost? Most of the fancy kitchens cost an arm and a leg ranging anywhere between 10 and 15 lakhs. I personally find designing the interiors of a house akin to taking any competitive exam when it comes to stress levels. If you are not fortunate enough to have zeroed in on the right interior designer, you wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat with so many unanswered questions. When we were designing our kitchen, so many questions ran through our minds on a daily basis, and without a proper designer, Google was the only answer. I’m sure you would have faced these at some point of your home building journey: Marine ply or BWR ply?  Or stainless steel? Hetitch or Blum? Steel hob or glass hob? Granite or Corian top? How much…

Hope you had a blast yesterday for Holi. Make a guess: how much can you fit in a 320 sq. foot space? Living and dining at the maximum, or perhaps living and a modest kitchen? This enchanting, little 320-square foot cottage caught my eyes this morning, and I thought I must immediately share it with you all. Bigger isn’t always better, right? This theory is more relevant for us as we are debating if we should move into a bigger house, or what we should look for in a new property. As a minimalist, big is not necessarily on my checklist for our 3-member family. But the husband begs to differ. The son and he prefer to play football inside. What do you think? Do you have sq.foot preference, or how big should the home be? The home showcases how to make the most of limited square footprint. My…

Hello everybody! It’s Friday and time for Shopping Friday post which will be up tomorrow as I have an exciting designer to showcase today. During one of my many FB wanderlust (which has been cut short this week because of Chrome Nanny :(), I came across images of a beautiful, breezy, street-side cafe kinda setting. Digging further, it turned out this pretty place was a cafe in Mumbai called Bong Bong.

Bong Bong is a restaurant in Bandra famous for its plus-sized portions and hard-on-waistline food. It was designed by Purple Backyard, a multidisciplinary design firm founded by Kumpal Vaid and Aditi Kotak in Aug. 2011. A glimpse of Bong Bong  set the standards high and left me craving for more. I wasn’t disappointed; Purple Backyard’s  portfolio is as resplendent as their name. The restaurant, in its new avatar, opened its doors on November 7th.

A view of Bong Bong by night. This image spells warmth to me with its deep colors,hanging pots, casual seating in the verandah – in a word, welcoming! A place that looks like home and hopefully serves great food. Mumbai readers: just curious to know if you’ve been to this awesome looking place?

I got hooked onto Purple Backyard the minute I saw the picture below. It’s as if casual and sophistication got together in an effortless and unassuming way. It’s breezy, chic and rustic at the same time, intense and casual, and thoughtful with a  couldn’t-care-less attitude to it. But, most of all, the soft play of colors brought images of a Nordic street-side cafe to me. I don’t know why given that there are so many rich colors on exhibit here something one often doesn’t see there.

This is how the conversation goes when my husband and I go to buy anything for our home.

Wife: “The sofa’s too big for our living room.”

Husband: “But it’s soft and comfortable to watch TV. How about the white one –  looks and feels good?”

Wife:  “High maintenance. Will get dirty. Chalo, let’s check out some place else.” And the weekend saga continues….

Buying furniture is not a life altering decision but don’t most of us act like it is :) And it can take eons to settle on the perfect corner table, often buying the first one we set our eyes on, but only after we’ve scoured a dozen other shops, right?

But here’s a duo who have patiently sat through hundreds of such conversations between couples, waiting to pick up the conversation after the dust settles, and encouraging them make to make the right choice.  Welcome to Soulscape. Meet Shweta Gupta and her team.


Located on 12th Main Indira Nagar, not too far from the iconic 100 feet road, is a contemporary lifestyle store called Soulscape.  Started four years back, the brand has carved a niche for itself in its segment. When I asked Shweta what the segment was, she had an interesting reply, ” it’s somewhere in between the premium luxury range and the one that caters to masses. “ And, that’s quite a big segment going by the size of the urban middle class with a deep passion to deck up their abodes tastefully.

I visited the store and came back inspired. Here’s a quick low-down on the store, its decor, and offerings.

We’ve been apartment hunting for the past two months. The apartment where we live currently has more pluses than minuses: practical utilization of space within the apartment, ample lighting and cross-ventilation, large rooms, functional amenities within the property, great location for public transport, highly convenient for groceries, reputed schools within a 3 Km radius, hospitals, well-maintained public parks, and is safe. The only reason we’re looking to move is because I would like to have a small space for indulging my green thumb and more open area for our son to play. Having looked at 27 odd old and new apartments/row houses/villas over 8 weeks, we’re on the verge of taking a break now. This would be our second apartment, so the expectations are high. And, it’s a little strange but true that we will need to spend double the price of our current apartment to get a new one, and still not get one which is satisfactory.

But, I’m very glad we did this exercise for I’ve learned a lesson or two in design by looking at all those tastefully decorated model apartments. Those perfect living spaces got me thinking: what if we spend just a fraction of the amount set aside for buying a new house and transform the interiors of the apartment we live in currently? We may fall in love with this place all over again…who knows? I may find new ways to pursue gardening indoors – with more varieties of houseplants in balcony, indoors and the utility area.

Have you ever fallen for a property with a bad floor plan but great model apartment? There was this apartment which had a kitchen to your left as soon as you entered and another one that opened to a guest bedroom.  So, I prefer seeing the floor plan first before falling for the interiors.

If you are planning to design the interiors of your new apartment or redoing the one where you live in, here are few tips that could be of help:

Curtains:

1. Replace the rods. Or better yet, hide them if you can, like in the picture above.
2.Take the curtains all the way up to the ceiling. High curtains give the illusion of high ceiling. If you have a false ceiling, the top of the curtains can go behind.
3. Try sheer curtains for contemporary/modern furniture and heavy silk curtains for solid wood/teak/antique furniture.

4. Experiment with different fabric/material like a old silk sari or bright cotton sari/dupatta to make a blind or curtain.

“dress your home” turns exactly a month young tomorrow.  So it was a pleasant surprise for it to be featured among the best 9 Indian interior design blogs. All you folks at blog adda, thanks for the recognition! Among other news, it’s been a harrowing time here as this site went offline for over 15 hours last evening. Many of you would have been greeted by the much dreaded “404 Page not found error”. There was a hardware crash and the service providers tried their best to restore as much data as they could. I almost lost many of  my posts and your valuable comments; I spent the whole morning trying to recover as much as I could. Later in the afternoon, much to my delight, the hosting providers were able to restore the data fully. So it was 4 hours of lost effort but all’s well that ends well.…