A Star Sudded Affair

Urban Zen creates a nude-toned chassis with a touch of Indian panache for iconic German furniture brands Hulsta, Rolf Benz and Hacker in New Delhi.

- Vishanka Gandhi

In the age of insipid Big Data and dispassionate statistics, is ‘storytelling’ a legitimate profession? And, what if the stories are told through spaces and not words or mind-fuzzing numbers? With no prior education in interior design or architecture, Rohit Suraj is the modern-day storyteller. Following the adage “form follows fiction” — his take on form follows function — he is here to design spaces that implicitly convey stories of the users and the creators. His latest tale is called Sky Full of Stars, a story of German craftsmanship set on Indian land.

A graduate from The Erasmus University, Rotterdam, this unconventional storyteller is the founder and design director of Urban Zen, a Hyderabad-based architecture, interior design and landscape design firm. From this creative haven, Rohit with his core team of 30 gives Sky Full of Stars the form of an elegant showroom for legendary German furniture brands Hulsta, Rolf Benz and Hacker. “I was left by the principals with the singular brief of making the space feel exclusive whilst conveying their strong German roots,” informs Rohit.