
Stop being trendy, create spaces that reflect your personality

Summary
A space should speak of the owners’ interests, feel real and not over-scaped—rooms that are not perfect but contain a certain harmonyI am writing this column in Coonoor. I’m sitting on the front lawn of award-winning designer Pavitra Rajaram and her husband Paul Abraham’s home. It is a beautifully sunny temperate day. There are bushes of hydrangeas and roses, poinsettias unbridled by pots, jacaranda and just a general cornucopia of green—an ensemble that feels like the perfect balance of English-cottage life and Indian tropicality. Rajaram’s home is the embodiment of her. It is the home of a decorator—she is the former creative head of Good Earth—so of course this domestic tableau is a perfectly balanced combination of objects and colours. But what I particularly love about it is that there’s little that’s trendy about it. Rajaram loves botanicals and colours, believes the perfect wall-colour is a shade of aqua and not white; there are books that showcase her and Abraham’s affinity for antiques and arts, bolstered by an outstanding collection of pieces. I know I can come back here in five years and it would seem just as relevant to their family and just as oblivious of trendiness.
That brings me to my supplication. It is still January, so if you are going to make a home-related resolution for 2025, let it be this: My space will reflect myself. It is the bane of an editor’s year-end rituals that one has to go through a year’s worth of images to suss out “trends", looking at what has been and what may be in the coming calendar. What I’m met with is a surfeit of rooms “made for the ‘gram". It used to be that you could tell designers’ works apart to some extent, but now one designer room blends into another, and I often find myself bleary, unable to tell one over-scaped, personality-less space from another.
Also read: Homes should reflect character and intimacy
Watch a series of design magazine home tours of celebrities, and you’ll understand exactly what I mean. I’d blame interior designers but it’s not just them. It is also the client who believes a popular reel on social media is more important than creating something that’s truly representative of themselves and how they live.
On the other hand, far too many designers do too much to spaces and it ends up looking like they are actually doing the same thing. And so design elements become trendy. I’ve noted a few over the year, and I hope it’s the end of them. Curvaceous walls, rattan-cane screen fronted cabinetry, MDF-made wainscotting, wall-panelling, recessed lighting, false ceilings, pseudo three-centred arches—think of them as the child-proofed versions of the perpendicular treatments, particularly popular on windows, cabinets and shelves—and the surfeit of white, beige and cream as the base colour.
On the other hand there’s the phenomenon I call “tropicalitis", the current habit of pancaking buildings in a couple of essential facets of ostensibly "sustainable" or “good design" elements: wood, kadappa, lime plaster, brick—all or some of them in a combination. What’s missing in all these different combinations is the personality created by people and not designers’ CAD drawings. What makes truly interesting spaces is a clear point of view, some risk-taking, a dose of fun or if that’s not your cue then fierce practicality. Without some of these elements, you end up with pretty pictures empty of soul.
I for one am attracted to spaces with personality, spaces that speak of the owners’ interests, that feel “real" and not “over-scaped", rooms that are not perfect but contain a certain harmony. Think of it like the meter in classical poetry, or what makes a piece of music sound beautiful. Whether it’s Bjork or Vivaldi’s Winter concerto, we like them for what we perceive as its symphony, which may not be quite obvious to non-Bjork listeners but if you’re a fan then you know what I mean. There’s a tempo that makes a space work properly. In a room, symphony is related through balance of forms, of colour, or scale, and then, contrarily, those elements are broken a bit with some unexpected points of interest.
I cannot make a stronger case for creating untrendy rooms than ask you to look at the spaces that architects and designers make for themselves. Consider their personal spaces and pay attention to how those are reflective of their strong personalities, and not trends. See Bengaluru-based interior designer Vinita Chaitanya’s Instagram, which has snapshots of her personal spaces and they’re a riot of colour, patterns and vintage finds. Or watch the documentary Sense of Tuning, on architect Bijoy Jain’s practice. Much of it is set within his home and studio in Byculla, Mumbai. Here’s an architect much envied by other architects, the subject of El Croquis international architectural magazine, the artist at the heart of an exhibition at The Fondation Cartier. His house has the quality of gathering, of an accumulation of interests, a feeling of being in progress, of an unfinishedness. It is beautifully and soulfully random.
If that sort of eclectic curation is beyond you then I’d say, stay boring, stay ordinary, stay simple and decorate slowly. Forget boucle because Kim Kardashian used it, stop building false walls and panelling into a Mumbai flat to make it look Parisian, because you’re likely to tire of it and any leakage will make it a nightmare to fix. Experiment with colours. The other day I had a conversation with a friend who said some clients find bright colours “cheap". Soon after that I was watching a YouTube home tour with a Bollywood actor, who lives in this oddly pristine white-on-white-on-beige house that looked like it had popped out of a Pinterest board. It had many of the design elements I mentioned earlier. And it made me wonder about the person living in it and how devoid of them the house seemed. Our design thinking still remains highly colonised, where colour is ridiculed. In fact colour is very difficult to do well. Indigenous textile traditions combine unusual colours together with an enviable panache. My friend, the textile designer Meera Mehta, has this amazing capacity to make pinks, purples and reds flow into one another in a seamless choir. Some, very few, interior designers know the trick. Look at them to lead you. If a designer is uninterested in the context within which a home is being made then that’s a red flag for me. India is about colour, about textures, materials, patterns, some of these elements in the right balance must be an essential part of an Indian home. Trending designs matter far less than the context of spaces and of your particular likes and dislikes. That should be the commandment upon which you build your home.
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.