1. Your journey combines interior design, styling, and entrepreneurship. How do these three roles influence the way you approach a project?
Honestly, they all bleed into each other. Styling taught me to look at a room the way you’d look at an outfit — what’s the one piece that pulls everything together. Design gave me the technical backbone, the “can this actually be built” part. And running a business means I can never forget that someone is paying for this, living in it, coming home to it every single day. So I don’t get to be precious about ideas that look good in a photo but don’t hold up in real life.
2. What is one design philosophy you follow that you believe makes a space feel truly personal rather than simply beautiful?
I always ask clients what they’re embarrassed to admit they love. That weird chair from their grandmother’s house, a color they think is “too much.” That’s usually where the real design lives. A space becomes personal the moment it stops being safe.
3. Having worked with an established design name like Talati Panthaky, what experience from that phase continues to influence your work at Maker Studio?
Discipline, mostly. Working under people who’ve been doing this for decades teaches you that good design isn’t a flash of inspiration — it’s a thousand small decisions made correctly, one after another. I still hear certain voices in my head when I’m second-guessing a finish or a proportion. That kind of rigor doesn’t leave you.
4. Your work often has a strong luxury aesthetic. How do you balance luxury with comfort and everyday functionality?
I think luxury gets misunderstood as “more.” For me it’s closer to “less, but correct” — the right material, the right weight of a door handle, the right light at seven in the evening. If a space looks stunning but you can’t put your feet up on the sofa, I’ve failed. Comfort isn’t the opposite of luxury. It’s the proof of it.
5. When you enter a completely empty space for the first time, what is the first thing you observe or imagine before beginning the design process?
Light, always light first. Where does the sun come in at 8am, where does it go by evening. Everything else — furniture, color, layout — is basically a response to that one fact. An empty room tells you what it wants to be if you’re quiet enough to notice.
6. How do you bring a client’s personality into the interiors without allowing the space to become overly trend-driven?
I try to design for the person, not for the moment. Trends are borrowed language — they belong to everyone right now and to no one in five years. A client’s personality is the opposite of that. So I spend more time asking about their habits, their childhood homes, what they collect, than I do looking at Pinterest boards.
7. Interior trends change quickly. Which current trend do you think has genuine long-term value, and which trends do you feel people should approach carefully?
I think the move toward natural, tactile materials — real wood, stone, linen — has real staying power, because it’s less a trend and more people correcting years of everything feeling synthetic. What I’d be cautious about is the very saturated, heavily styled “maximalist” look you see online. It photographs beautifully, but it’s exhausting to actually live inside. Give it a couple of years.
8. Maker Studio has grown into a recognizable design identity. What was the biggest challenge in transforming your personal creative vision into a brand?
Letting go of the idea that I had to be in every decision. In the beginning, Maker Studio was just my taste with a name on it. Turning that into something a team could carry forward, with a point of view that survives without me micromanaging every cushion — that was the hard part. It meant writing down instincts I’d never had to explain before.
9. Your profile shows a strong presence in media and design features. How has being visible in the design industry affected your approach to your work?
It’s made me more careful, in a good way. Once people start watching your work, you can’t hide behind “it’s just for the client.” You start thinking about what a project says about you, what it adds to the larger conversation. It’s pushed me to take fewer projects, but push harder on the ones I say yes to.
10. Looking ahead, what kind of spaces or design projects do you want Maker Studio to be known for five years from now?
I’d love for Maker Studio to be known for homes that age well — not the ones that look perfect on day one and dated by year three, but the ones that feel even more like the people in them as time goes on. If someone walks into a space we designed a decade from now and it still feels current without ever having chased a trend, that’s the win.
