DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Inside a Mumbai duplex shaped by reD, with ingenuity, play, and a delightfully ingenious diamond cutter

- VAISHNAVI NAYEL TALAWADEKAR

Whoever said diamonds are a girl's best friend — the whoever being Marilyn Monroe — clearly never met Ekta Parekh or Maithili Raut. Or, for that matter, their fellow co-founder Rajiv Parekh, who'll tell you that the three architects behind Mumbai-based reD are far more fascinated by diamond cutters than diamonds. Take their latest adventure: an 11,000 sq ft duplex in Mumbai's Worli neighbourhood, stitched together from two apartments stacked one atop the other. The challenge? Connecting the units without losing access to the upper-level, sea-facing balcony. Ambitious, yes but so were the architects. What began as a routine structural check soon turned into a full-blown diamond-cutting escapade, opening the slab and carving a discreet, hidden passage from two rooms to the balcony.

Slabs, however, were only the beginning. “What really fascinated us,” Rajiv says, “was the family inside the walls.” They spent weeks observing routines, quirks and little habits: the lady of the house, precise and methodical; the gentleman, more spontaneous, with notepads tucked into unexpected corners; and their mother, who has a flair for hosting. Even tiny details the number of shampoo bottles, the kids' routines - shaped how they imagined every room.