Inside Basant Bahar — a second home where scale, form and a little creative freedom changed the way we designed.
Every once in a while, a project begins with a brief that sounds something like — we trust you, experiment. For a furniture designer, there are very few sentences more exciting than that. Also, mildly terrifying.
Basant Bahar is a second home tucked away in the suburbs of Ahmedabad, designed for weekends, holidays, friends dropping by, family gatherings and all the wonderfully unpredictable things that happen when a house is meant to be lived in a little more freely.
There is something very different about designing furniture for an entire home.
When you design a single piece, you think about the piece. Its proportions, material, comfort, detailing, and where it might eventually belong. But when you design for a home, every piece suddenly becomes part of a much larger conversation. A chair has to make sense with a table. A centre table has to hold its own in a large living room without overpowering the sofa. And sometimes, even two completely different rooms need to feel like they belong to the same house.
This project became exactly that for us.
Instead of following one material, one colour, or one repeated design language throughout, we worked with contrasts — warm wood against black stone, deep burgundy upholstery against natural teak, bold graphic fabrics against quiet neutrals, cane against solid wood, and polished surfaces against pieces where the grain was allowed to do most of the talking. There was space to experiment, and more importantly, the encouragement to do it.
And so, we played. The living room was probably where we felt the scale of the project most - quite literally.
It is a vast space, with two seating zones that needed to work independently when required but still feel like one large living room. Instead of filling it with several disconnected pieces, we designed one oversized two-way sofa that sits right in the middle of it all. It became the anchor.
One side could belong to one conversation, the other to another, while the piece itself connected the entire room. Because of its sheer size, we knew it couldn't disappear into the space. The muted green corduroy brought in just enough colour, while the exposed teak framework helped break down the upholstered volume and connect it back to the rest of the furniture.
Around it, we deliberately changed the language.
There are bulky chairs and slimmer chairs. A long sculptural bench sits alongside a much lighter sofa. Two large centre tables sit together rather than one perfectly centred table. Their tops are simple, but underneath, layers of light and dark wood build up chunky legs that give them their own rhythm.
Nothing needed to form a perfectly matching set. In fact, we didn't want it to. That became one of the most enjoyable parts of Basant Bahar - allowing each piece to have its own character while still making sure the room felt whole. 
The dining room moved in a warmer direction. Here, wood takes over. A large wooden dining table anchors the space, surrounded by chairs upholstered in a deep burgundy fabric. We kept the chair frames visually light, allowing the upholstery and timber to bring just enough richness to the room without making the setting feel heavy.
And because a dining table of this scale inevitably becomes more than somewhere you eat, we wanted it to feel comfortable enough for everything else too — long dinners, conversations that continue after the plates have been cleared, an afternoon laptop session, or the usual gathering where everyone somehow ends up sitting around the table.
Then there was the floor. It was one of the first things we noticed at site and something we hadn't really encountered before - a grey stone floor filled with irregular fragments, tones and movement. It was beautiful, but visually, it already had a lot to say.
So the furniture couldn't compete with it. Instead, teak became our constant. Its warmth softened the grey underneath and gave us a common thread to carry across the house. Once that foundation was established, we could start introducing other materials and details - marble, metal, upholstery, different textures and finishes - without making the spaces feel busy.
And that is where the smaller experiments began.
A side table doesn't simply have to be a rectangle, so one gets an unexpected curved cut-out. A bench doesn't need a conventional backrest, so its wooden members extend, overlap and stop at different points. Individually, they're small decisions. Together, they give the furniture a slightly offbeat quality - the kind you notice slowly rather than all at once.
The aim wasn't symmetry.
It was balance.
And perhaps that is why this project felt different for us.
Over the six or seven months that Basant Bahar took shape, we found ourselves playing with scale and form in ways we hadn't before. We made pieces bigger than we normally would. We let curves interrupt straight lines. We mixed bulky furniture with pieces that almost disappear into the room. We allowed wood, stone, fabric and metal to sit together without asking everything to look like it came from one collection.
Because homes don't really work like collections anyway.
They are meant for long lunches that become evenings, extra people showing up, someone taking over one end of the sofa while someone else reads at the other, paintings finding new corners, and furniture slowly collecting stories of its own.
Basant Bahar gave us the space to design for exactly that. Design is allowed to be fun.
Sometimes, a home just lets you play.
