Architectural Designer

EPISODE Powai marks the brand's arrival in Bombay, dropped into one of the most competitive hospitality landscapes in the city. Powai, the planned lakeside district around Hiranandani, is dense with restaurants and bars fighting for the same crowd, and the design had to announce itself the moment you walked in. Where a club of this kind might normally spread across a suite of rooms, here the entire program is compressed into a single grand volume of roughly six thousand square feet: ballroom, lounge, and bar gathered into one continuous, immersive space organized around a single powerful center.

That center is a triangular planter at the very heart of the room, a raised island of greenery around which the whole space turns. The DJ booth sits just off the planter at dead center, booth-lined ceilings fold down along either side, and the plan reads as one gesture: a green core, an energetic ring, and a soft perimeter of seating oriented back toward the charged middle.

The signature move is written in marble. A local black-and-white marble was cut into slender fluted staves and split, one after another, to open out a mirrored, repeating figure, deployed across the walls like a giant material tattoo and framed top and bottom by continuous timber molding. Underfoot, the same marble is laid as a concentric inlay that reads almost as graphic design; overhead, the ceiling steps in charred timber, burnt and half-burnt woods pressing a dark lid over the pale marble and the green core.

The intensity peaks at the taproom, where a vast stainless-steel sheet carries the fluted motif onward in black, green, and white marble. If the club draws on the old gymkhana, the members' room and its ceremony, it does so entirely through material rather than ornament: one room, one strong center, worked hard enough to hold its own in the most demanding corner of the city.

I grew up in Bombay, the birthplace of Bollywood, watching Western films alongside Hindi ones, and I've always been curious how the two cinematic worlds would adapt to each other. Mafia movies felt like the right place to start: The Godfather and Gangs of Wasseypur are landmarks of the same genre on opposite sides of the world. This experiment recasts iconic Hollywood characters with the drama, grit, and raw emotion of a Bollywood masala film, using AI to give each one a new look and a new life.

This artwork is an homage to Carlo Scarpa and his craft. Scarpa's signature elements, the orthographic steps, repeating patterns, and rigorous structural grids, have always reminded me of Indian stepwells. Bridging those two architectural vocabularies became the experiment: a series of custom tiles in varying dimensions.

The tiles are three-dimensional closed shapes rather than flat paintings. They interact with light and shadow, casting geometric patterns that shift through the day and giving the gallery wall where they were exhibited a quietly changing life of its own.

DesignBuild examines how design can respond to four conditions reshaping everyday life — loneliness, food insecurity, extreme heat, and climate migration — through twelve buildable interventions for Savannah.

The chapters below are organised into four tabs — Living with Loneliness, Food Insecurity, Extreme Heat, and Climate Migration. Each moves from research to intervention: the condition as it is lived, its impact on Savannah, and three design-build proposals with concept sketches, renders, and space programs.

Over ten weeks, we carefully curated proposals designed to make a measurable, lasting impact on each of these goals.

Commissioned for a residence on Mumbai's Worli Sea Face, SHELF is an ode to the city's history and its underbelly, where hidden objects carry stories of their own. The project set out to curate a library of offbeat antiques and artifacts that embody Mumbai's past and its street life.

We sourced pieces from the legendary Chor Bazaar, the city's 'thieves' market,' hunting for objects with real character, then paired them with handcrafted elements and abstract artworks. The client wanted something one of a kind and stayed closely involved, so the composition took shape through many iterations and long conversations. Created with Nayan Mote of NMS Studio, the result is an installation as personal as the city it draws from.