We Just Got Our Second Home in Goa. Here's What We Learnt About Second Home Interior Design in Goa.

I'm writing this from my desk at home in Goa. It's early morning, the birds are loud, and there's a cup of chai going cold next to my laptop because I keep forgetting to drink it. From where I'm sitting I can see the trees, and if I'm lucky, the magpie robin that shows up every morning on the branch outside. This is peace. This is exactly what I designed this corner for.

If you've been reading Inner Stories for a while, you'll know this has been a long time coming.

For the past four or five years, Yogi and I have been shuttling between Bangalore and Goa constantly. Our sons have been training with football clubs in Goa, so we were here for weeks at a stretch, then back in Bangalore, then here again. It was a lot of moving around. But somewhere in all that travel I started noticing something about myself. 

Every time I was in Goa, I worked better. There's something about waking up to birds, stepping out onto a balcony with chai, that makes you realise how much mental noise you carry around without noticing. Some of the work I'm most proud of from the last couple of years happened here, in those weeks between Bangalore trips.

And then there's the community, which I genuinely wasn't prepared for. I expected Goa to be a place you come to for holidays. What I found was a place where a lot of interesting people have chosen to actually build their lives. Artists, entrepreneurs, people who left stable careers to do something that made more sense to them. That's a good community to be part of, especially when your work is creative.

Bangalore is still home. That's where we live, where we work, where most of our life happens. But Goa is where we come to decompress. We've been coming here long enough that the back and forth started feeling less like travel and more like a life split between two places we love. So we decided to stop treating our Goa time as a visit and make it properly ours. We designed our own second home here, exactly the way we wanted it, and now when we're in Goa, we're really in it.

You can take a look at the home here.

While we were setting up our own place, we were also working on two other homes in Goa for clients. Designing all three at the same time, each with a completely different brief, put a lot of things in sharp focus for me. Here's what I learnt.

Second Home Interior Design in Goa: Design for the Lifestyle First

The reason most people want a home in Goa is the lifestyle. The slow mornings, the quiet, the ability to just sit somewhere and breathe. But when it comes to actually designing the space, that reason often gets forgotten in favour of what looks good in photos.

The homes that work best here are the ones designed specifically to support that pace of life. This is the thing most people miss when thinking about second home interior design in Goa: the lifestyle comes first.

A terrace or balcony that you actually want to spend time on, not just look at. Hangout spaces that are easy and comfortable, not formal. Rooms that feel open and connected to the outside rather than sealed off from it. In our own home, the terrace off our bedroom is where the day starts. There are trees right next to it and at night you can see more stars than you'd think possible this close to a town. That space was as important to design well as any room in the house.

If you're building a second home in Goa, think about what you actually come here to do and design for that first.

Decide what kind of home this is before anything else

This is the question that changes everything, and it's worth spending real time on before you make a single design decision.

There are three genuinely different situations. The first is a home purely for your own use, one that stays closed when you're not there. The second is a pure rental or Airbnb that you may never actually sleep in yourself. The third is a hybrid, a home built for yourself that you rent out when you're away. Each of these is a different design problem with different priorities, different material choices, different furniture strategies, and different things that can go wrong if you don't think them through upfront.

Sukoon is a good example of the hybrid. Anshuman and Uttara built it as their own Goa home but it runs as an Airbnb when they're in Mumbai. That meant every decision had to work for both situations at once. Personal enough to feel like theirs, practical enough to handle guest usage and long periods of being closed. Getting that balance right takes a different kind of thinking than either a pure personal home or a pure rental would.

Susegad on the other hand is a pure rental. The owner may never live there herself. That brief is completely different and leads to completely different decisions, as you'll see below.

Goa's climate will challenge your material choices

The humidity, salt air, and monsoon are not gentle on a home. Anything not specified with this in mind will show it within a season or two.

Wood is the conversation I end up having most often. Clients love real wood and I understand why completely. But solid wood in a house that stays shut through a Goa monsoon warps and swells. It will become a recurring problem. The right call is usually treated wood for cabinetry and storage, real wood only where it matters most aesthetically, and good quality laminates for everything else. You get the warmth without the annual headache.

For a rental, custom furniture can actually work against you

For a home you live in, custom makes sense. For a pure rental, it's worth thinking twice.

A rental needs to feel fresh to keep getting bookings. If everything is built in and fixed to the walls, refreshing the look in four or five years is expensive and disruptive. Well chosen, off-the-shelf furniture gives you flexibility. You can swap out key pieces without touching anything structural and the house feels new again without a full overhaul.

For Susegad, a rental property we did in Candolim, nothing was custom made. Every piece was sourced and styled. The skill in that kind of project is knowing what to pick and how to put it together so it feels considered rather than random. The whole home found its personality from one early choice: the client loved a soft mint green wallpaper and we carried that colour through the upholstery and accents across the whole house. It held together beautifully.

The things you already own are worth bringing with you

When we were putting our Goa home together, we brought a few furniture pieces and lights from Bangalore, pieces we already owned and loved. We built around those rather than starting from scratch. The result is a home that feels lived in from day one, and that quality is genuinely hard to get if you buy everything new at once.

I think about this when clients tell me they want a completely fresh start. Sometimes that's the right call. But often the things you've lived with and still love are exactly what will make the new place feel like yours faster than anything new could.

If you're at that stage of figuring out what you want to keep and what you want to change, our post on how good design starts before the floorplan might be useful.

If you're planning a home from outside Goa or outside India entirely,  this post on remote interior design projects walks through how we handle that.

Two years of designing homes here, and now having one of our own, has made me understand Goa differently. It's not just a beautiful place. It's a place that genuinely rewards slowing down, and a well designed home here makes that so much easier. Whether you're looking for a corner of the world that gives you peace or a smart investment that holds up over time, getting the design right from the start makes all the difference.

If you're thinking about a home in 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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Your home should reflect your unique story, not a social media feed. What daily ritual or "messy reality" does your current space struggle to accommodate? Reach out and share your thoughts with us, let’s design a home that finally breathes with you.

Schedule a consultation or write to us at info@innerspacedesign.co.in 

Aanchal & Yogesh 

Inner Space Interior Design Studio

Est. 2008 | Bangalore, Chennai, Goa.

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