The Thinking Behind Custom Furniture Design for a Bangalore Villa
- Aanchal Yogesh
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
The swing was the first piece we figured out, and in many ways it set the direction for the entire house. It hangs in the center of the living room on metal chains with small brass ball details. Clean wood frame, plain velvet seat, nothing ornate about it. But a swing in a living room is a very Indian thing. Most people who walk in smile the moment they see it. That combination of a familiar, warm element in a completely contemporary form is what we were working toward across all of Shubhagruham.
Custom Furniture Design
The husband loved contemporary interiors. The wife wanted traditional Indian. Getting both into the same home without one taking over the other is genuinely one of the harder design problems we have been given. Traditional Indian design fills a room quickly. Place it next to something contemporary and the contemporary almost always ends up looking sparse or cold by comparison.
So we stopped thinking about mixing two styles and started thinking about how to make one. Take a traditional element, understand what makes it feel the way it does, and find a way to execute it that a contemporary eye would accept. The swing is the clearest example. The form is traditional, the execution is completely modern. This is Custom Furniture design at its best.
The Half Moon Sofa Set
The half moon cane sofa set in the art room took the same approach as the swing but applied it to everyday seating.
Cane is a material you find in Indian furniture that is decades old. Woven, tactile, unmistakably connected to a certain kind of Indian home. The frames here are dark solid wood, clean and straight-lined, with no carving or decorative detail. The cane panels sit within them as a material choice, not a style statement. The seat cushions are in dusty pink and olive, colours that feel warm without feeling heavy.
The coffee table in this room has a story of its own. It was an old table that the clients already had, and we refurbished it rather than replacing it. Tiles were added as inlay into the tabletop, which gave it a completely different character while keeping the original piece.
The paisley wallpaper on the lower half of the wall behind the sofa works the same way. Paisley is one of the most recognisable motifs in Indian textile craft. Here it is in a muted, sophisticated palette. The pattern is traditional, the colour story is completely contemporary. The woven basket pieces grouped on the upper wall above it are craft objects displayed the way you would display contemporary art.
The Swing, the Sofas and the View
The living room had one clear brief from the clients: an uninterrupted view to the waterwall and the deck. Any furniture placed in the conventional way would have cut right across that sightline.
So the two sofas sit on either end of the room instead, each with its own solid wood coffee table. Both sofas are curved, which means a group of people sitting together can actually face each other rather than all looking in the same direction. The tables are wood with a resin detail, natural material with a contemporary finish.
The swing sits centered between the two sofas facing the backyard directly through the glass doors. The backrest rotates, so you can face the garden or turn toward the room depending on what you want. Both sofas, both tables, and the swing were designed together as one composition because the room only works if they do.
The Custom Resin Dining Table
The slab is solid walnut with green resin channels running through it. The grain of the wood is completely visible, and the resin follows the natural voids in the slab rather than cutting across it. Each table made this way is unique because the wood determines what the final piece looks like. No two come out the same.
The chairs are custom, with a rounded oval back and dusty pink upholstery that picks up the warm tones running through the rest of the ground floor. Dark solid wood legs, and a back shape that is gentle enough to sit in for a long meal without noticing you are sitting in it.
The Yoga Daybed
The yoga daybed is probably the most considered piece in the house given how much thinking went into something that looks very simple.
Low to the ground, solid wood frame, plain upholstered seat in dusty pink. The height was the main decision. Sitting lower changes your posture and the quality of rest in a way that takes a few minutes to notice but is very real. This piece is for after a practice, for meditation, for reading quietly in the afternoon.
The Piano Sofa
The music room had to be creative and fun. So we designed a piano themed custom block coloured sofa to sit below a custom music wave art piece. The colorblock is two separate fabrics joined at the seam, the contrast inspired by piano keys. It is one of those pieces where the concept is simple but the execution takes time to get right.
The art piece is a visual interpretation of a sound wave, made specifically for this wall. It is large enough to anchor the room and the form is immediately recognisable without being literal. Music rooms can easily tip into being themed in a way that feels heavy-handed. The wave piece avoids that because it is abstract enough to work as art first and a music reference second.
The Teal Sectionals
The second floor sitting area opens to the terrace, and the sofa faces that view. It is L-shaped, teal, and large enough that a group of people can settle into it properly. The fabric colour was the main decision. Teal is bold enough to anchor a large open space without needing heavy furniture around it. But the thing about an L-shaped sectional this size is that it naturally pulls people into conversation. Everyone is angled toward each other. There is nowhere to perch awkwardly on the edge. It is the kind of sofa a group settles into and stays in.
There are two coffee tables in front rather than one. With a sectional this large, a single fixed table rarely works for everyone seated. These were designed to be light enough to move easily, so the configuration can shift depending on how the space is being used.
The metal artwork on the wall behind it was custom made for the space. Scale and placement matter with a sofa this large, and a standard framed piece would have felt undersized. The metal work holds its own.
Designing the Media Room Furniture
The recliners are from Stanley. They are the centrepiece of the room and we did not try to compete with them. The two armchairs on either side are custom, in deep wine velvet with channel tufting and slim gold legs. They bring warmth into what could easily have become a very dark, heavy room.
The center table was designed to sit within that palette. Dark surface, gold legs, the same metallic detail that runs through the armchairs. In a room with this much upholstery, the table needed to be visually light but still do its job.
The wooden laser-cut panel on the wall is a craft piece that works as art, but it was also designed with the acoustics of the room in mind. The pattern is organic and fractured, the kind of thing you can look at for a while and keep finding detail in. It keeps the room from feeling like it exists only for one purpose.
The rug ties all the seating together. Without it, three separate pieces of furniture would just be three separate pieces of furniture sitting in a room.
The Outdoor Furniture
The deck furniture was designed as part of the same project, not added at the end.
The chairs and coffee table base are woven rope, which holds up through weather in a way a lot of other materials do not. The cushions are in a traditional Indian block print pattern. The woven texture connects back to the cane work inside the house. Outside, under the pergola, next to the water wall and garden, it needed to feel like it belonged to the same home rather than being patio furniture that happened to be placed there.
Almost nothing in Shubhagruham came from a catalogue. That became clear piece by piece as we worked through the brief. The design language was specific enough that standard options rarely had the right answer. When the brief is this particular, you have to make the furniture.
If you are working on a home where two people have different ideas about what it should feel like, we are happy to talk through how we approach that. [Reach out here].
The full Shubhagruham project can be found here.
If you're thinking about a home in Banglore, Chennai or Goa, we'd love to hear from you at info@innerspacedesign.co.in. You can also take a look at what we do if you'd like to understand how we work before reaching out. And if you're still in the early stages of figuring out your own style, our free Style Workbook is a good place to start. Download it here.
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Aanchal & Yogesh
Inner Space Interior Design Studio
Est. 2008 | Bangalore, Chennai, Goa.
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