1. How does your design approach change across residential, commercial and turnkey projects?
Honestly, the starting point is different for each. With a home, I’m designing around a person — their habits, how they wake up, where they relax, what makes them feel calm. With commercial spaces, it’s more about brand and function — the space has to work for people who aren’t emotionally attached to it, so flow and efficiency take priority. Turnkey is a different beast altogether because we’re not just designing, we’re delivering — so a lot of my thinking there goes into sequencing, timelines and making sure nothing falls apart between design and execution. The creative instinct stays the same, but what I’m solving for changes completely.
2. Your work has a warm, minimal, luxurious feel — what shapes that?
I’ve never liked spaces that shout. I’d rather a room feel expensive because of proportion and material, not because it’s loaded with things. A lot of it comes from just paying attention — to old homes, to how light falls in a room at different times of day, to textures that age well instead of looking dated in five years. Minimal doesn’t mean empty to me, it means nothing in the room is there by accident.
3. What’s the first thing you study when starting a project — lifestyle, architecture, or the space?
Honestly, lifestyle first, always. The architecture and the space are fixed things, you can work with them, but if you don’t understand how someone actually lives — whether they cook every day, whether they have guests over often, whether they work from home — you’ll design something that looks good on day one and feels wrong by month three. Once I know that, the space starts telling me what it needs.
4. How do you balance aesthetics with everyday functionality?
This is where a lot of “luxury” interiors go wrong, honestly. It’s easy to make something photograph well and be a nightmare to live in. I ask a lot of boring but important questions early — where will the remote go, how many people actually use this kitchen, does this fabric survive a toddler. Luxury that can’t survive daily life isn’t luxury, it’s just decoration.
5. Pune and Kolhapur have different sensibilities — how do you adapt?
Pune clients, a lot of the time, are more exposed to global design trends, so there’s an openness to contemporary, pared-back looks. Kolhapur has a strong sense of tradition and family — spaces tend to be more communal, and there’s often a real emotional connection to certain materials or elements passed down or tied to the region. I don’t impose one language on both. I listen more carefully in Kolhapur projects, honestly, because the brief is often unspoken — it’s about respect for how the family has always lived.
6. What mistakes do homeowners commonly make?
The biggest one is starting with furniture and Pinterest boards before they’ve even finalised the layout. People fall in love with a picture without asking if it suits their space or their life. Another common one — under-budgeting for lighting. People spend on furniture and skimp on lighting, and lighting is honestly 50% of how a room feels. My advice is always: get the layout and lighting plan right first, everything else follows.
7. How do you select materials, colours, lighting and textures without overwhelming a space?
I usually work with a very restrained palette — maybe two or three base tones — and let texture do the talking instead of colour. A stone, a wood, a fabric, sitting next to each other, already creates richness without needing more colour thrown in. Lighting is layered, never just one source, because that’s what gives depth. The trick to premium without overwhelming is restraint — knowing what to leave out is honestly harder than knowing what to add.
8. How do you manage quality across design, execution and vendors in turnkey projects?
This is the part that separates a good designer from a good design-and-build company, honestly. We stay involved on-site, not just at design handoff. Every vendor — carpentry, electrical, false ceiling — is briefed with the same drawing, so nobody’s interpreting differently. I also build in checkpoints, not just a final walkthrough, so if something’s going wrong it gets caught at week two, not week ten.
9. Which trend has lasting value, and which should people be cautious about?
I think warm minimalism and natural materials are here to stay — people are tired of spaces that feel cold or overly styled, and there’s a real return to comfort. What I’d tell people to be careful about is chasing very trend-heavy statement pieces — a particular colour of the year, or an ultra-specific pattern — because those date fast, and redoing an interior isn’t cheap. Trend pieces should live in things you can change easily, like cushions or art, not in your flooring or cabinetry.
10. What kind of projects would Aamare Designs like to explore next?
I’d love to get into more hospitality and boutique projects — small hotels, cafés, places where design actually shapes someone’s experience for just a few hours but needs to leave an impression. On the residential side, I’m drawn to larger, more personal projects — bungalows, farmhouses — where there’s room to build a real narrative through the whole home instead of just a flat. Basically, spaces with more story to tell.