Museum Quality

A dazzling apartment designed by Ashiesh Shah for art patron Shreyasi Goenka is filled with site-specific works, rare vintage furniture and important contemporary design for a gallery-like feel high above the Mumbai skyline

- Rosalyn D’Mello

Shreyasi Goenka cannot live with empty walls. “Every time I’ve moved into a new place, the first thing I do is put up the art,” she says. “I can do without everything else.” We are seated in her living room, which is the first space you enter. To the left is what she refers to as the formal living area; to the right, past the fluted, retro bar, is the dining room. Two artworks immediately pop into view on either side of the entrance; Rajorshi Ghosh’s photo montage work, Untitled (Hubble photograph), and a large Tanya Goel canvas, which, from afar, looks like a pixelated colour field, wholly concealing the immense labour that goes into each rectangular block (the artist makes her own pigments from materials sourced from sites of architectural demolitions). Across this wall, on the other side of the open-plan apartment, a grid-like view unfolds of the terraces atop the art deco buildings synonymous with Marine Drive. To their left, in plain sight, is the Arabian Sea.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

Hers is among the youngest buildings on Marine Drive. “It’s been in various stages of planning for 20 years,” explains Goenka, who grew up at one of Mumbai’s classiest addresses, Jolly Maker, in Cuffe Parade, before moving to Benzer Terrace, Worli. She returned to Jolly Maker after marrying Punit Goenka, and the couple lived in the Haveli building in Malabar Hills for five years as they waited for their present residence to be completed. When it was, in January 2017, the first objects she unpacked were from her art collection, including the oldest in her recent possession, Jitish Kallat’s 2008 acrylic on canvas, titled Universal Recipient, purchased during her last days in Jolly Maker.