Who lives here: A family of six – the client and his wife, his son and daughter-in-law and two children.
Project name: Bothra Residence
Carpet Area: 3000 sq. ft.
Location: Orbit Victoria, Shakespeare Sarai, Kolkata
Nestled in a very Indian contemporary style, this picturesque apartment impresses with a dramatic and classic oriental style, thus infusing a mystical element in the space.
The client wanted a nice and elegant home that would exude an Indian vibe with a contemporary edge. Designer Ajay Arya took inspiration from the brief and executed a home with richly detailed interiors to stand testimony to a signature style while keeping the aspirations and lifestyle of its owners in the forefront.
Designed to exude Indianness, the home is equipped with various motives, Indian Art and architecture. The entrance foyer has beautiful inlay work that patterns very well with all the old architecture, so they used the technique and enhanced it with a little contemporary edge. It’s a chic Chevron patterned in grey, white and black such that it can also be decorated beautifully. It’s some sort of stencilling that can be filled with flowers. So, whenever there is a festival, they can just fill up parts of it with flowers, with flower petals. The clients were fond of using different colours; hence the house has a well-balanced colour palette.
The master bedroom is embraced with a Sabyasachi wallpaper. Sabyasachi also works with many Indian motifs and patterns, and the colours used are also muted and distressed. An Indian Kashmiri theme is chosen for the master bedroom, whereby the carpet is a Kashmiri carpet and the shawl is used as a throw. Ajay has taken inspiration from everything which speaks Indian while trying to represent it in a contemporary, modern way. So, the key concepts for the project, especially for the common areas, which are the passageway, the living, dining, the master bedroom and the son’s bedroom, have an Indian influence. The other zones, which accounts for the family area, like a family lounge for TV viewing, and a guest bedroom, exude a more contemporary aesthetic.
Originally a four-bedroom apartment, there were not too many civil changes in the layout. The layout was also quite vast to comply with. This was an apartment designed and executed from scratch, so there weren’t surely too many challenges. But the designer did knock off the wall between the living, dining and lounge and used glass there so that one area leads to another, making the house look grand. Mirrors are also used to comply with the grandeur giving the illusion of both spaces.
Michelangelo marble was used as the flooring material, sourced from Portugal. The client wanted to use seasoned wood for the entire project which was sourced from an old colonial house in Chennai that was getting redeveloped. The furniture was custom-made for the project by Ochre at Home. The decorative writings for the passageway and the living area are from Jade Design in Mumbai. The wall in the children’s room behind the bed was hand-painted by an artist called Jit Chaudhary.
