Striking A Balance
AD Architectural Digest India|September 2016

A connoisseur of craftsmanship with an eye for modern aesthetics, designer Hemant Sagar’s remodelling of his father’s house was an exercise in simplification

Sunil Sethi
Striking A Balance

The Indo-French fashion partnership between designers Hemant Sagar and Didier Lecoanet, which started at couture school in Paris in 1979, has wended a long route. From their first store on Paris’s rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to a large factory in Gurgaon, and a wide network of online and offline stores—they also handle production for brands such as Balmain and Chloé in France. The duo has often taken the road less travelled, and among their newer directions is the creation of two neighbouring abodes—as much a family story as an odyssey of rediscovering India.

It was Sagar’s father, a prominent lawyer and forward thinker, who bet on Gurgaon as a city of the future. In 1999, he bought a 2,700-square-foot plot to build a two-storeyed, four-bedroom family home with a terrace and encircling garden. When Sagar and Lecoanet relocated their business to India, they wanted a place of their own. As luck would have it, Gurgaon property prices slumped, and some years later, taking the stray cow they spotted on the empty plot next door as a good omen, they bought it (the plot, not the cow). Eventually, over five-and-a-half years, they built a beautiful villa, designed by a French architect friend, and decorated on principles of feng shui. It is a tranquil haven of soaring heights, rippling water bodies and soothing woodwork.

This story is from the September 2016 edition of AD Architectural Digest India.

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This story is from the September 2016 edition of AD Architectural Digest India.

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