A Textural Narrative

Making architectural changes before embarking on the details of furniture and design, Tejal Mathur has imparted the feel of a bungalow to this apartment in Mumbai, with a skylight enhancing the perception.

- Devyani Jayakar

Like all good designers, Tejal Mathur believes that good design should go beyond fulfilling the mere basics. So while converting a nondescript three bedroom apartment with a carpet area of 1,600 sq ft into one with two bedroom suites with walk-in wardrobes, she felt it was essential to reformat the spaces. “Like most Mumbai apartments with an open terrace, this space had a fairly simple layout, though smaller proportions and indeed smaller bathrooms. It was a shell that had squeezed three rooms as built form,” she says. But reorganising the spaces was possible only because the clients understood that the space would be served better with two bedrooms rather than three small ones.

Tejal confesses that she is driven to inject structural proportion into a space, versus creating only furniture and function driven interiors. Here, the starting point was to emphasise the height of the space, create an illusion of volume, in fact.

“Our very first goal with the space turnaround was to allow for the door frames to go up to the ceiling. Structural beams dropped to a woefully low height of seven feet, so we moved the doors out of the beam line,” says Tejal. But this was not an easy task, since they had to be mindful that the division of spaces followed a particular logic. “The apartment had to be redesigned architecturally, without ending up with shoddy offsets which would then have to be disguised.”

The brief specified a quiet, contemporary aesthetic…nothing flashy. “But the techniques I’ve used are traditional. Walls are in IPS and the teak joinery is a traditional craft. The finishes may be oldworld, but the language is sharp,” says Tejal.