How to personalize your (rented) apartment

The couch, coffee table, side tables and concrete diamonds (on the coffee table) have all been designed by Ravi Vazirani Design Studio. On the wall are prints from a series titled 'Grid Dancing' from Librairie Yvon Lambert in Paris. The chair is from Chiki Doshi and the old fashioned telephone is from Chor Bazaar—both in Mumbai. The upright concrete hand is from Paradise Road in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

是的,我是一个收藏者。”拉维Vazirani承认sheepishly, as soon as we sit down for the interview. His early admission might have been a result of my raised eyebrows, as I take in a set of identical mini cloches lined up neatly on one of his cabinets. “I liked those cloches and I wasn't sure I would get them again, in case one of them broke,” he adds by way of explanation, as my eyebrows continue to stay raised.

I am hardly one to judge, and a walk through Vazirani's house—located in one of the leafy by-lanes of Bandra, a suburb in Mumbai— gives me the impression that here sits a man who is not just an unabashed hoarder, but a space addict as well. I get the sense that his mind is racing through new placement ideas for the many wonderful things lying carelessly around his living hall. It's a charge that he does not completely deny.

“I love mixing things up. If you look at the things in my house, some of it is art deco, some of it is very modern. It's just a bunch of things that I love and I think that if you are in the profession, and you have a workshop that makes furniture, then your house never stops evolving. Of course, it takes a certain amount of obsession,” he smiles ruefully. That's a quality of which Vazirani has plenty.

Vazirani on his front porch.

NOT QUITE TEMPORARY

Rental houses don't pose much of a challenge for him—given that he has changed a number of them in the last few years—except for the inevitable heartbreak when he has to move. There's a bright side to that heartbreak, he tells me. “You get a chance to start afresh. With this house, it was happenstance. I had no need to move when I saw this place, but as soon as I did, there was no way I couldn't shift,” he recalls. With good reason—Vazirani's house is on the ground floor; it is part of a bungalow that is divided into four apartment-like spaces. There is also a luxurious driveway that might have convinced me that we were chatting away in a sunny part of Goa if I didn't know better.

由约1600平方英尺,家里来了s with an 11-foot-high ceiling with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Most of the windows retain cross grilles that remind me of sleepy bungalows in New Delhi in the 1980s. That and the terrazzo tiles are elements that Vazirani retained, although they ripped down much of the rest of the house. “We broke the bathroom and the kitchen down. Because it's a rental, we could not go around making crazy changes, but there were some essential structural changes required to make the house more livable,” he explains.

The house has a service entrance for the kitchen. Before Vazirani moved in, the passage that one walked through to get to the kitchen extended all the way to that entrance, which led to very little light permeating inside. “I didn't need that passage, so we broke down that wall. That brought a lot of light into the kitchen. I created an island kitchen layout, it added a personal touch to the space—a place to have leisurely breakfasts and have a moment with yourself before the day starts,” he says.

'Bieber Unplugged', a print by photographer Jaya Ramchandani, dominates a wall in the guest bedroom. The bed was created by Vazirani's studio.

CONCRETE PROOF

His love for concrete is well articulated around the house. He did up the bathroom in a concrete finish using Indian Patent Stone (IPS), lending a modern industrial touch to the space. What I find particularly interesting are the diamond-shaped structures that are arranged with studied carelessness on the coffee table. Those, along with most of the tabletops in his house, are made of concrete, and were created in his own workshop. His master bedroom and kitchen are the two parts of the house that have the most natural light. The living room doesn't have much natural light during the day (courtesy the trees in front of its large windows), but Vazirani makes up for it in the evening with ample lighting.

Low, unpolished stools—stacked high with books and art—catch my attention. Vazirani found one of his karigars sitting on one of them during a regular workday and thought they were ideal for corners around his house. They lend a charming, personal touch. He did have some trouble convincing his karigar to part with the stool though and make more of them exactly as they were. “I told him I wanted them exactly like I had seen them—unpolished and unfinished. He couldn't believe it, or probably thought I was crazy,” he smiles.

Ironically, for someone who spends so much time obsessing over his interiors, the place he ends up spending most of his time during the day is his front porch—working on his laptop. Sitting with him at that very spot, sipping on a cup of coffee, it is easy to understand why. “I am surrounded by trees in a garden in the middle of Bandra. It's perfect. There are so many times when I'm sitting here and working and I can't help but wonder, ‘Wow, is this for real?'” That's a sentiment I share as I set down my cup and prepare, rather reluctantly, to leave.

DOING IT YOUR WAY

Vazirani's tips on making a rental more personal

• People have this strange attitude towards rented spaces that, ‘Since I don't own this apartment, I don't want to buy new furniture.' I always tell people to invest in furniture with which they want to live. When you move into your own house, you are still going to have a good chair. • Invest in art that you like and that makes you happy. • Invest in good bed linen.