TJ Flat

What you are looking at

Both images here are photographs of the finished flat. The living room takes all of its colour from one painted wall. Flat planes of green, cobalt, mid-blue, coral, cream and black meet near the centre in triangles. A slim linear picture light sits above them. A charcoal sectional and a marble coffee table on brass legs face the wall. Both sit on a cream rug, over polished marble. A cast-iron grille in a scrolled floral pattern fills the window opening on the left. A cushioned bench sits beneath it. A freestanding royal-blue grid of open squares stands between the room and the passage. Some squares are backlit, others are backed in mustard and teal. They hold pottery, brass figures and a painted wooden horse.

The second image is the media wall. Fluted panelling in graded blue covers it, washed from behind by concealed light. A floating console sits below it, its white shutters cut in a repeating four-petal jaali pattern. Open boxes hold brass figures, a lota and a green owl-shaped pot. A bench sits under a lattice-grille window.

The moves

One wall carries the colour, which lets the room read as calm rather than busy. Everything else is grey, cream, marble and pale blue.

A small living room is usually divided by furniture. This one is divided by a shelf you can see through. The blue grid marks the room's edge without closing it or blocking light off the floor. Its backlit niches become the room's second light source after dark.

The Indian vocabulary is working rather than signalling. The jaali on the console shutters lets a cabinet breathe and hides what is inside it. The craft sits at eye level in lit boxes instead of spread across surfaces. The window seat turns a grille bay into somewhere to sit. In most flats, that bay is dead depth behind a curtain.

Why we design this way

This is our design language at the scale of a flat: Indian intelligence, not Indian ornament. The jaali is here because it lets the cabinet breathe, not because it looks traditional. The craft on the shelves belongs to the family, not to a decorator's scheme. We settle daylight, storage and how you move through the flat before we choose a colour. That is why the strong wall can afford to be strong. The reasoning is set out on our page about contemporary Indian homes.

Every Aalekh interior is drawn, visualised in 3D and reviewed by Ar. Pooja Kothari before fit-out begins. See the rest of our renovation work, or read how we approach apartment interiors in Bangalore.