Love, Light and Interiors

An Year Long Exploration in Styles and Colour Schemes

Have you ever come across a question asking you what your colour was or which colour most closely described your personality? A few months back I was staring at this question for a prestigious magazine interview and I’ll be quite honest, I faffed and spoke at length about how my soul bleeds purple due to its spectrum of qualities (one point even being its position within the spectrum). While it’s true that many of its affinities correlated deeply to my personality traits, if I had to think of a colour I would give myself without being judged, I’d probably say beige - an unassuming quiet colour that is most comfortable in looking elegant but not taking attention, a soft colour that wants to merge with its surrounding without standing out.

About an year back I met someone who I could describe to be a dark fiery maroon, someone vivacious who commanded attention when he stood in a room and never wanted to blend in. Someone whose favourite colour was black, much like the dark mood he found himself in more often than many others like me. While I loved sunshine, the great outdoors, green canopies, rainy days, my friend who often dressed in black was a tech genius who preferred controlled environments which included artificial lighting, an air conditioner that complemented his nonchalance about the weather and green turfs put in for the love of practicality rather than a love of nature.

What did our hearts collude on? A shared fascination for space. What is this a story about? If you’re a romantic, it’s a tale of companionship that turned a beige person into a brown person and a maroon person into a blue. If you’re a designer, though I believe it’s not possible to be one without the other… it’s a tale of style where zen and industrial colour palettes fused into one.

My friend in black describes this story differently than I remember it but his version is more fun to hear for people so I’ll reiterate that one. On a particularly boring for him phone call, I kept rambling on about some chronicles from my life as he patiently pretended to listen to me while he perused through Pinterest looking at his preferred design porn category : office dens. I believe back then he was feeling particularly disenchanted with the co-working space we shared so he decided to transform a small space he owned into his private sanctuary - a project he could have undertaken with much more peace and much less fanfare had I not been an interior designer, and let’s be honest, had we not been recent enough for him to not want to pretend to respect my professional opinions and calibre.

What began then were intense sessions of pin sharing - like a graph that ebs and flows with drastic drops - the colour palette from our shared pins resembled something akin - lots of his blacks punctuated with some of my beiges, followed by more blacks, dotted by few more beiges. Gradually like the waves, the curves of our graphs became softer. The blacks became greys, the beiges became brown. With that almost finally merging into 2 parallel roads, meeting and parting over the course, we began looking at the space. What caught my attention and had my heart hooked were the huge windows that overlooked stunning green canopies and had a direct view of the blue skies of Delhi on a clear July morning. While my friend at this point worried about the glare and insisted on covering the glass with small frames and thick blinds, he did not give up on the office based on the presence of the windows and that for me was a silent win. We continued the back and forth on the design development where black walls were suggested, heated words were exchanged over grey curtains but what we finally executed was a beige coloured, light oak wooden flooring office furnished with beige blinds, brown desk, black sofa with a white throw, grey cushions and a black door.

Before and After of the First Den (Also my first design project as an independent consultant)

Before the year began, at that point just a few months after we met, I would have never gulped down on the idea of a black sofa or a black door on my light oak floor. My friend at this point would have never put the sofa next to the window to enjoy the view or considered light wood AND light walls put together. But a few months of animated conversations held over early morning coffees and long nights spent engaged in pillow talk led to us finding harmony in beige, black and lots and lots of day light that set the scene for the initiating moment of a gaiety journey, and allowed me to understand that beige and black together could be seen as a design experiment gone right rather than a disaster of temperaments, and allowed my now companion to enjoy slow afternoons spent next to the windows looking out at the rain with a book and some greasy Chinese.

As if to put our learnings to test, fate gave us a chance to prove our changed design sensibilities to each other as we embarked on transforming yet another office for him, this time much grander in size. Yet again, we began with fiery pins exchanged, grey walls dissed, beige chairs quashed but what we noticed were the base lines we already had set in our heads - windows staying as is to let in as much day light as possible, the retaining of a beautiful outdoor green space to sit around while it rained, my happiness for a black table set over dark-ish hard wood floors and his appreciation of the elegance of wood grains. What we passively noticed within ourselves was my acceptance of taking grey walls as a design challenge I didn’t mind conquering, and him going ahead with a warm brown scheme and beige walls despite me not insisting on it.

Before and After of the Second Den

The new office is still underway but curves of our graphs in life also have now gotten visibly softer. Our personalities have started to reflect our new colours. He happily finds a corner to sit with me in for our morning coffee instead of previously sitting against a glass wall where he could simultaneously see everyone heading into work. I don’t cringe at people noticing me and even smile back at many. He has opened more windows towards greens while I’ve learnt to appreciate techniques used to make a windowless space cosy.

Adapting to new morning coffee places

In design, as in life, the more you open yourselves and allow more people in, the more you try to give a fair chance to the person in front of you, the more you open your mind and heart to new experiences, new learnings, new reckonings and new comforts.

Blending into our new colours