Embracing Elegance

A minimal material palette, playful details and seamlessness are hallmarks of this elegant Surat apartment, designed by architects Pooja Shah and Niel Parekh, for a family of six spanning three generations.

- Rupali Sebastian

An interior design project sometimes transcends spatial considerations and enters the realm of lifestyle, of how people live their lives — or would like to live their lives. The assignment, in this case, is centered around dialogues and conversations; optimizing and sculpting space becomes a corollary. The exercise of space-creation becomes an act of getting under the skin.

When a textile businessman approached Surat-based architects Pooja Shah and Niel Parekh of The Company of Design to design his 1,890-square-foot 4BHK apartment — having seen and liked what they did with his friend’s house — this was precisely how the ball was set rolling: as a series of “most interesting conversations regarding the lifestyle of the family that would be living in the house. As more than designing just the aesthetics of the space, we wanted to design their lifestyle,” says Pooja. “We believe that it is not the style of an architect that becomes a pivot for a design but the context that forges a design. Irrespective of scale, for us, any project is like a blank canvas where we strive to create a harmonious painting through creative placement of the paraphernalia of that space,” declares the duo.

For the architects, the fact that the client has also chosen them for the thought process meant that there was a meeting of the minds in this assignment, rather than merely delivering a wish list. “It makes designing more cohesive when the client and architects are in complete sync in terms of visualization of the space. In this case, the client was very clear about his brief, and was open to our ideas as to how it could be achieved.”