A compact Mumbai apartment, high on style and storage

O’nest Interiors meld Victorian style and minimalism to a powerful end.

Curated by: Rupali Sebastian
Photographs: Photographix India | Sebastian Zachariah; courtesy O’nest Interiors

The site

The house is a compact 3BHK in the heart of Powai, Mumbai. It would be home to a family of three: an artist, a pilot and their 10-year-old son. One room had to be left vacant for art. “The clients are dear friends, and have always encouraged us professionally,” O’nest Interiors’ Ankita Dabrai and Neha Sawhney tell us. “So we were more than happy when they asked us to design their home.”

The brief

“This was their dream house, a silver lining in their lives, a place where they could find solace at the end of the day and a place where their 10-year-old son could thrive and relate to,” declares the duo. The design, therefore, endeavoured to articulate this desire for sanctuary.

The visual expression

“Life in this world is nothing but a harmony of opposites,” remark the designers. “We used this concept and emerged with the Japandi theme, albeit with shades of silver, grey, green with a hint of black and gold. The design concept we used for this adobe is largely Japandi with a twist in the colour palette. Due to the client’s love of minimalism and ours for the Victorian style, we designed this home with a hint of both.”

The alterations

As the designers had to finish the project in 60 days, civil changes were restricted to the kitchen, where the existing marble floor was replaced by beautiful black and white floral tiles and the granite counter and dado tiles made way for grey KalingaStone and subway tiles. Moreover, the AC positions provided by the builder and the dummy beams that would conceal the conducting and piping were awkwardly placed and would pose maintenance problems in the future. This also needed to be rethought.

The challenges

The short timeframe meant that the team had to be constantly on their toes, planning ahead of time when it came to the layout, design decisions and material selection. “The challenging part was also creating more room for storage in the snug apartment without cluttering the space and keeping enough room for free movement,” Ankita and Neha disclose. “For maximising storage, we used every corner to the hilt. Spaces between columns were used to create storage units, and columns themselves became bases for ledges. The furniture profiles were slim.”

The material and colour directions

Veneer, fluted glass and tiles star in the material selection, while the colour scheme includes black, white, grey, olive green, laminates in green and blue, and metallic accents.