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Interior

2020

Photographer : Sameer Tawde

Naked is a home that is undraped, undisguised and unexaggerated. Our client's bold vision and unconventional brief required us envision a 1000sft bachelors pad akin to Philip Johnson’s Glass House with an open plan sans walls and doors. Essentially, we had to create a pavilion for viewing the hillock in the distance, a lucid space that offers a seamless integration with the cityscape 15 floors above the ground.

The site offered us two 1 BR units each comprising of a living-dining space, a kitchen and a bathroom with large windows that gave us unobstructed views of the surroundings. We demolished all the walls to create one contiguous space that is further sprinkled with bare minimum furniture and in the process, we fashioned a home that is synonymous to a galerie de sculptures with (shockingly) no patterns or colours.

One enters directly into the central living space of the home. This comprises of a cluster of a Soderhamn Ikea sofa, a pair of Phantom Hands Easy Armchairs and Bent by MuseLAB, a metal profile chaise that all gather around a very architectural coffee table, Bloom (also designed by MuseLAB); all of these thoughtfully curated pieces rest on Autumn, a hand-knotted carpet made of handspun high twist pure wool with handspun pure silk accents from the Nouveau series of Cocoon fine rugs. Each piece of furniture exudes a certain amount of rawness in its tactility; the idea behind bringing together these pieces was to experience their materiality and silhouettes, with visual and physical interactions.

Mumbai,Maharashtra,India

Architects	:	MuseLAB
Area	:	1000 sq.ft
Year	:	2020
Website	:	https://www.muselab.in/

One part of the home is a dedicated ‘cook and eat’ zone. Here, we have designed an open steel kitchen in collaboration with Kuche 7 for our client who also happens to be a closeted epicurean. The kitchen countertop extends to form a dining table that seats four gastronomes on the Mungaru dining chairs by Phantom Hands and under a linear cluster of thin pendant lights.. This happens to be the most favorite space of the home for us. A panoramic landscape shot by him dons the wall that bookends this open plan. A nondescript portal leads to the wet kitchen and the dry yard. Here we have a working countertop in East Indian Walnut wood that contrasts beautifully with the grey cementitious walls by Concrete Works India. Across the portal to the wet kitchen is the door to the powder bathroom.

The other end of the home is the sleeping space, comprising of a simple wooden bed with a backrest upholstered with faux tan leather; the bed-side tables are merely shelves sans drawers. Across from the bed is Nougat II, floor mirror by MuseLAB and the Phantom Hands Kangaroo chair that beautifully pairs with the Mungaru side table. FN Souza and Rabin Mondal pair up to don the other wall that bookends this home. A pair of wardrobes flank another portal that leads to a walk-in for athletic gear. The light grey vitrified tiles that continue into the bathroom walls and on the dado beautifully offset the matte black sanitary fittings and fixtures from Vitra. We have eliminated the false ceiling completely and instead relied on a very simple grid of exposed conduits with cylindrical architectural lights.

This particular project is extremely special for us as we are rarely presented with such bold briefs and bold clients. The process and our response to the programmatic requirement warrants us to focus on nothingness, on the essential elements. It made us think laterally; we had to de-clutter not only the space, but also our minds to design for what one needs and not what one wants. And before we go on and on, the home says “I want you to see me ‘naked’, unapologetic, gritty but honest.