The other day, scrolling through Instagram, I was accosted by a sponsored post pitching an AI design tool. Responding to descriptive prompts like “contemporary” and “rustic”, it could turn out a vast number of stylistic options for one space—basically, you skip the part about process and research and just embrace spatial personality dysregulation.
This is a world where the word “contemporary” conjures rounded beige boucle sofas and neutral walls, where “rustic” signifies live-edge tables and dark wood accents. There is a complete lack of context. They could be from everywhere, anywhere and somewhere all at once, spaces that seem so stereotyped yet fanatically banal that you cannot even guess a cultural or geographical connection. Eerily, though, the images that showed up looked similar to many of the real-life projects that we see at the moment.
View Full Image
Articles about decorating a ‘puja’ room are popular on design platforms. . (istockphoto)
At the same time, some of the most popular subjects on design platforms are topics like “How to design a puja room”. A recent favourite among the readers of the design content website that I run was a story on the subject of Indian-isms in design. We are going through a period where there are all sorts of options available. You can go the route of the ubiquitous, or you cast a vote for a bit of sociocultural representation in your space.
Design for Serendipity
As someone who spends a lot of time looking at images and reading about projects, I know that it costs more when your design rebuffs its cultural and geographical context. Even if you happen to use AI technology to get a design, inevitably the price of buying things that look like they’re from other places takes a lot of resources and the results are far from satisfying.
Far more interesting and pocket-friendly is to buy local. Design your space with the same approach as the farm-to-table principle for food. Do a little less, buy things off the cuff, see what happens when you make a few mistakes. Spaces are more interesting when they’re created with a certain effortlessness but there is no way to articulate effortlessness if things have found their way into a room with excessive consideration.
Spaces when articulated with a nod to the local context, become so unique that you cannot have that interpretation anywhere else. Take the example of Art Deco. I quote this style in particular because 2025 is being celebrated as the 100th birth year of Art Deco. The design movement that celebrated excess in the West came to India and was reshaped in local formats across the country. In south India, the designs are informed by local patterns like kolams, or in Chettinad, Art Deco is presented in entirely domesticated settings. In the Western format, it is always associated with shiny, gleaming, geometric and decorative excesses, while in India it takes on different formats. A recent travelling exhibition, Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh—Pioneering Modernism in India, showed its influence on the palace of the maharajah of Indore, Yashwant Rao Holkar II, while in south India, it has a populist tenor as seen in its influence on theatres, office buildings and homes.
Applying the principle of adaptability can mean different things in different situations. In architecture, it is about working with legacy techniques and local materiality as far as possible. In interior design it can be far more difficult, because there’s a lot of choice. Then it’s really about what you don’t do rather than what you do. I find that when spaces have a mix of low-brow and high-brow solutions, it presents a more compelling storyline.
I was recently hunting for a bed for my guest room, and during a trip home to Kerala, I visited a friend who’s been in the antiques furniture business for decades. I found a pair of antique rosewood single beds, slim and long at 4x6ft, that could take mattresses not more than 4 inches thick. I fell in love with them, but knew it would be a bit of an effort. It needed a custom-made mattress, and I wondered if some of my guests would take umbrage to the wooden slatted bed frame that feels different to the spine from a spring boxed bed frame. This despite the fact that according to most research, a firmer bed is better than a soft one.
Anyway, I bought it. Having a piece of furniture in my home that comes from one of my favourite people and from a part of the country that is my heritage feels correct. To style it, I went back to images in old issues of Inside Outside and images from the home of late interior designer and art collector, Leela Shiveshwarkar.
Buying the Right Sofa
Another bug-bear of Indian interior design is the sofa. It is an unpleasant foraging experience, especially if you’re on a budget. Of all the questions I am asked on the topic of design, “where can I buy a sofa?” is the number one query.
Finding a comfortable, well-priced sofa seems like one of the great design challenges homeowners in the country face. A sofa has to be both engineered and designed properly, and buying from a decent brand can push budgets over the cliff. On the other hand, it is not a piece that I would recommend you have made by a carpenter.
To help out a friend who was asking the same question, recently I looked through some designers’ work and landed on a design solution that I really liked. It was from an apartment project in Gulmohar Park, New Delhi, by interior designer Shivani Dogra. She refurbished an aged Ikea sofa by subtracting its basic elements and adding two layers of hand-tufted cotton mattresses. The handmade mattresses are more comfortable, and you can have them custom-made in any colour scheme. That means you end up with a solution that’s unlike anything anyone else has. The addition of this very Indian accessory also gives the piece a charming relatability. An Ikea sofa refurbished with Indian mattresses seems to me like the perfect post-liberalisation design trick. A blend of all that is available as choice.
When you have a space made up of imperfectly solved objects, things brought to life by stories, you create places with memory. This is important, particularly when a home is new. Spaces that have some creases, a bit of patina, rooms that look like they’ve been lived in. Or will age graciously—the way you could have foretold Sharmila Tagore would when you first watched her in Evening in Paris. There is to some places, just as with people, an elegance that is beyond just the selection of objects. That should be a sacred “prompt” when designing a home.
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.