In With The Old & New

Homely, radiant and timeless… FADD Studio designs a new home for a senior couple in Bengaluru that looks forward to the future, is rooted to the present and celebrates the past.

- Rupali Sebastian

 A house that has been home for years, decades, no longer stays a mere four walls and a roof. A place that has seen milestones achieved; joyousness celebrated; and situations faced both sweet and sad, turns into a repository of memories, of cherished possessions; a sanctuary whose every corner has a tale to tell. So when owners of such a home — senior citizens — are faced with the task of relocation, the exercise, justifiably, becomes fraught with emotional upheaval: there’s perhaps the excitement of the new… but most definitely the heartache of letting go of the old.

The Goyals were one such couple. Their home was a beautiful, sprawling villa filled with the effervescent energy that comes from having a family of four daughters. But now the nest was empty; their children were busy looking after homes of their own. And the task of maintaining a large home is always a big one, age and spirit notwithstanding. So a tough decision was taken: they would downsize and move to an apartment, to address the concerns of both, security and maintenance. Their quest for the perfect apartment was painstaking but fruitful… and serendipitous. For their search yielded — apart from a new home that fitted their requirements to a T — professionals who would help them set up one: FADD Studio, or architects Farah Ahmed and Dhaval Shellugar, to be more specific. The senior couple liked what the duo had done with one of the apartments in the same complex, and gladly handed over theirs with the following brief: nothing too severe, straight-lined and ultra-contemporary; something that would be easy to use for their age demographic; and an interior that would weave in some pieces from their old home.