10 breathtaking Indian homes of 2024 loved by AD editors

Step into the world of stunning design and innovation with the best of Indian homes of 2024, a curated collection of homes adored by AD editors. From delicate heritage restorations to Geoffrey Bawa-inspired tropical marvels, these projects showcase the best of India's architectural brilliance.

An Art Collector's Home In Chennai

As far as design considerations for his home went, Jaiveer Johal knew three things for certain: that the walls should wear concrete, that there should be no straight lines, and that the bedroom should overlook the calming river rather than the sea. “I wanted the home to be designed around the art, not the other way around,” says Johal, whose acquisitions for the home included no new art. He already owned everything he needed and brought in stylist Samir Wadekar to curate the collection and oversee the art hang. Johal imagined a space that was fluid and amorphous, something that evolved to suit the occasion.

The stars aligned when he met architect Faisal Manzur at the party of a mutual friend. “We started a conversation and ended up finishing each other’s sentences,” Johal reports. “I asked him if he was interested in putting together a mood board for the house.” Manzur said yes, and then yes again, a few months later when Johal asked him to take up the design reins for a full home remodel.

Text by Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Tropical Paradise in Kolkata

At coutourier Anamika Khanna’s home in South Kolkata’s Alipore neighbourhood, her luxe idiosyncrasy and elaborate craftsmanship appear in measured doses. A trio of sheer ivory chikankari partitions greet visitors on entering through the front door; beige couches in the living room draw their shine from a set of cushions embroidered with dull silver. Embroidered panels adorn the walls on staircase landings, leading up to the terrace, each frame depicting part of a towering Tree of Life—symbolic, notes the designer, of the life that thrives all around her.

In planning for a home that evoked the Geoffrey Bawa aesthetic, Anamika found her partner in Channa Daswatte—the renowned Sri Lankan architect whom Bawa had mentored. “We related with each other and instantly became friends,” she says. “It was a very collaborative process. If I came up with an idea, he found ways to work it in.” In designing the house, Daswatte has stitched his aesthetic with hers.

Text by Sohini Dey; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Geoffrey Bawa-Inspired Madurai Home

This home was born of a dream that architect Sumanth Ram Sriram, based in Madurai, had dreamt up when he was a student of architecture. His father had started working on its bones back in 2010; by the time Sriram graduated college in 2018, he had already started to fill in with paint. It’s no surprise that Sriram had a brush with Anjalendran—a leading architect in Sri Lanka who followed in the footsteps of none other than Geoffrey Bawa—who inspired him to build a tropical fantasy in the sweltering climes of Madurai, across an expanse of 11,000 square feet and three floors—from the basement to the first.

The home is monikered “Palimpsest House” for a reason—it lies on top of an existing framework, allowing you to peek into the layers that were brought to life gradually, over the years, by the family. Sriram’s mother, Geetha, an engineer herself, helped build the imposing tower with a Gothic brick arch mirroring the church door that was retrofitted at a later stage.

Text by Arshia; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A 'Handmade' Home in Rishikesh

This homestay in Rishikesh is a stellar example of excellence in community building and sustainable architecture. Over 90 people from 18 countries contributed to building the house over 547 days. The result is a “hand-sculpted house” straight out of a fairytale, a philosophy explored in a book of the same name by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael Smith, which deeply inspired brothers Ansh and Raghav Kumar.

“We wanted to craft something locally rooted yet beautiful,” Ansh shares. “Our goal was to embrace natural forms and curves, creating an experience that invites people to appreciate its beauty without intellectualising or objectifying it. No one involved in making the house was an architect or an artist, and yet what they created proves otherwise. They say form follows function, but in our case, the form follows the community,” explains Ansh. The 600 square-foot house, crafted from mud sourced from 150 metres of the site, bears the imprint of the hands that shaped it and is adorned with a facade featuring sculptural works.

Text by Gautami Reddy; Edited by Khushi Sheth

An Alibag Home Surrounded by Trees

In the central courtyard of a home in Alibag stands a champa tree in semi-cascade, its fragrance spilling like uncontained joy into the dining area, the living room, and the swimming pool. Landscape architect Kunal Maniar, who planted the lone beauty in memory of Geoffrey Bawa, feels there is no way one can go wrong with a champa tree: “It’s like that classic Banarasi sari in a woman’s wardrobe.” Maniar’s soft spot for nostalgia is a recurring motif in the two-acre property— one that presents itself strongly in the way he has annexed ideas of intelligent, biophilic landscape design with memories of comfort borrowed from childhood.

Rahul Mehrotra, the architect of this project, believes that for weekend homes, the scale of the house should be comfortable in the way it sits on the landscape and the presence that it exerts on the landscape visually should be minimum. “Most of what gets built in Alibag replicates the model of the Western villa, which is trying to create an external presence on the landscape that can be rather obtrusive. This eventually creates a polarization that is not healthy for our society,” says Mehrotra. “When I design weekend homes, I imagine the house as a space where in spite of its sophistication it will also make someone from that locality feel comfortable. They shouldn’t regard the house as an alien object that has dropped out of space.”

Text by Rajashree Balaram; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Home Filled With Layered Beauty

Anupam Poddar and Eeshaan Kashyap’s generous first-floor Delhi home in the shadow of Humayun’s Tomb harks to a leisurely way of living. As one enters, a long corridor stretches on one side; on the other is an indigo dining room, with a table setting composed of Burmese lacquer, rock-crystal candleholders, and amethyst minerals. This is just the start of the visual feast. In room after room, a treasury of layered wall colours emerald, rose madder, and yellow ochre—are offset with a collection of sculptural ceramics and rare textiles.

A star attraction of the apartment is the vivid collection of unusual textiles displayed on the walls. “I wanted to soften the large blocks of pure colour that dominated the spaces,” admits Poddar. He was fascinated by non-figurative, often abstract textiles made for foreign markets, and his exacting collector’s eye sought 19th-century pieces of resist-dyed Indian exports for Indonesia, where they acquired cult significance as sacred or ritual cloths.

Text by By Sunil Sethi; Edited by Khushi Sheth

Palinda Kannangara's first project in India

In a residential locality in southeast Bengaluru is a home with the sky at its heart and the city in its bones. This is Sri Lankan architect Palinda Kannangara’s first residential project in India, and he was determined to make it as contextual as possible—a home shaped entirely by its environment. His inspiration for it was an unusual one, Tipu Sultan’s summer palace—but how he distilled the spatial sense of a palace and infused it into a family home for four is the kind of transfiguration almost typical of his practice.

Palinda Kannangara took the idea of local and indigenous to both material and layout. The palette is largely brick, timber and local stone—the layout, a structural salute to Tipu Sultan’s summer palace. Built on two plots that sit back to back, you enter the space through a wide doorway built into ochre walls. Step through and you find yourself beneath an open sky, facing a double-height veranda with a line of windows above it. The symmetry of this facade is so distinct that anyone who’s seen the original that inspired it will immediately recognize it.

Text by Divya Mishra; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Restored 1970s Home In Ahmedabad

This modernist home in Ahmedabad, built in the 1970s and restored recently architect Kunal Shah, is a reminder of a classic domestic architecture that an entire generation of Indians grew up in — a modernism that is timeless, that we adapted to suit our culture, climate, materials and our domestic rituals. As you enter the compound, you glimpse the home surrounded by Ashoka trees.

Shah believes in a refined minimalism, in a modernism that was about simplicity and being rooted in domestic rituals. Spaces in the house allow for informal postures, as opposed to sitting formally on a table and chair. “You can sit cross-legged, lie down, take a nap, read your paper. It’s keeping in mind a certain lifestyle, a Gujarati way of living, where you come home in the afternoon when it’s bright and hot, and you rest and recline, chat, play a card or board game. So the furniture also allows you to relive a gentle pace of life,” says Shah.

Text by Komal Sharma; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Heritage Home in Hampi

Artist Shama Pawar’s home and workspace are deeply anchored to the ethos of comm­unity. In the tradition of village dwellings in southern India, her four ­bedroom house has a central courtyard that’s open to the sky. Surrounded by lemon orchards, the house is a testament to the practice and impact of craft traditions as well as nature’s abundance, which sustains the output. Her courtyard is often filled with the soft chatter and laughter of women artisans from the village as they gather to discuss ideas and techniques, and sit with tools and piles of fibre to manifest bags, mats, baskets, jewellery, wall art and more. An artist herself, Pawar has deep respect for the magical process when craft builds itself up in a pair of human hands.

Far removed from the urbane under­ standing of development, Anegundi is a village that has survived and thrived on the tenets of sustainability. For Pawar, Anegundi is also the most precious gift she has ever received in her life from the person she loved the most—her father. It’s not surprising then that it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Text by Rajashree Balaram; Edited by Khushi Sheth

A Farmhouse in Delhi

The Delhi farmhouse of textile and fashion designers Peter and Cecile D’Ascoli is a layered, maximalist homage to Indian textiles. After founding Talianna Textiles, a design atelier, in 2006, Peter and Cecile—from New York and Paris respectively—made India their home. Ensconced, rather snugly, in a South Delhi apartment along with two daughters, the chance to embark on a new chapter “with our own fruit trees and a sense of breathing out” moving to a villa surrounded by lawns proved too irresistible to pass up.

An admirer of symmetry, the lack of straight lines in the house was a challenge triumphed over by Peter cleverly tenting the living room in a “shamiana effect…that helps settle the room with a sense of calm,” in his words, and decorating the dining room with large Tree of Life panels of his own design. Largely inspired by historic textile documents often used as a base for his collections, Peter also states encounters with legendary figures such as Renzo Mongiardino and Madeleine Castaing as notable influences.

Text by Cosmo Brockway; Edited by Khushi Sheth