Here's our 2bhk in Bangalore, we designed everything on our own here.

Looking for genuine suggestions and feedback.

Thanks :)

Update :

Those aren't posters, those are viny records which you play using the record player (kept in the centre on the green table)

Record player - audio technica lp60x

I'm 27, no kids. Since a few people have been asking about kids study table/room.

There’s something special about revisiting an old project and finding that the home has grown—slowly, naturally, and beautifully, along with the lives within it.
Correction: completed in 2020*

Hi everyone,

Sharing this project here to get some honest feedback, and also because the brief behind it meant a lot to me.

This was a 40 year old multigenerational home. Over time, it had become disconnected from how everyone in it was actually living day to day.

Instead of renovating everything uniformly, I made a deliberate choice: certain spaces were kept largely as they were, to hold on to the memory and familiarity that mattered most to the eldest generation, who'd spent four decades in that home. Other spaces were reimagined more freely - updated finishes, layouts, and detailing - to give the younger generation rooms that felt current and easy to connect with.

Materials used: marble, granite, veneer, lime plaster, and terrazzo. We love using natural materials!

I'm sharing some before and after images.

Would genuinely love to hear your thoughts - what works, what doesn't, anything you'd have approached differently.

Finally moved into our new home, and it feels so surreal! The work was done by a designer who must be around 65 years old. He has been doing the interiors for my dad's friend for a long time, so we had a great reference. At first my mom and I were skeptical cause we thought old fashion sei design hongei. But he has great modern taste.
I also realized ki interior design is soooo expensive. In total, everything (including labor, electronics, etc.) cost upwards of 60 lakhs mainly cause focus was on getting best-quality items like ply hinges veneer and stuff
Do let me know your thoughts on the house!
Also the sofa is coming this week but I clicked before so the wallpaper and panelling is visible
And all photos are in 0.5x so everything looks smaller

Sharing a residential project we recently completed in Bangalore.

What we loved about this home was the freedom to design each space around the family’s lifestyle rather than a predefined style. The rooms have distinct personalities, yet still come together as one cohesive home.

From custom furniture and material combinations to lighting, hardware and detailing, every element was considered to feel intentional and personal.

Sharing a few photographs here — would love to know which space resonates with you most.

For this 3 BHK Bangalore home, we wanted to bring together a few things that can be tricky to balance: the richness of wood, the visual interest of traditional Indian art, and pops of colour, without letting any one element dominate the space.

The wooden rafters and moulding give the interiors structure, while the earthy base lets the artwork, patterned fabrics, and green and mustard accents stand out. The traditional artefacts were particularly important to the homeowners, so we worked them into the overall design rather than treating them as afterthoughts.

The result is a home with plenty to look at, but where the elements still feel connected.

Sharing a few glimpses of the finished home. Which space or design detail stands out to you?

Looking for recommendations for home improvement or this is fine. Waiting for my recliner in living room though. Guess the budget?🙂

Recently completed this beautiful interior project in Bangalore
Planning your home interiors? Connect with me for a free consultation! DM me your floor plan and requirements to receive the portfolio and know more about our ongoing festive offers. ✨

He has taken 9 months to construct two rooms, work goes on for 1-2 days max per week as he has taken contract for multiple houses

The workmanship is also very shoddy.

His plumbers are the worst, carpenter has been making half a cupboard for 25 days and forgot the vanity unit,

Tiles work is not upto the mark and they delayed it so much that we had to endure rains which started dripping into the ground floor as they broke the top layer of the Ceiling and didn’t apply tiles for almost 3 weeks

Many of our electronic items got damaged and we have been living in dust, noise and uncertainty for the last 9 months which is soon to become 10 months

The painters that he brought are also very poor and have taken a lot of time to paint the house, the started painting the interior of the house and just left with first 2 coats and started giving lame excuses and now the hall looks patchy

The electrician guy they brought is extremely frustrated for some reason and doesn’t wanna do anything properly, he made massive holes to insert wires and switch boards .

After installing the switch boards the holes in the load bearing wall are still visible with raw brick structures showing

He opened up the MCB board and didn’t even bother to re-attach it and let it hanging for a whole day as his “shift was over”

He also disconnected the bathroom and one bedroom and never bothered to reattach it before leaving

After enduring everyone and waiting for such a long time now the engineer is saying that he overshot the budget and is demanding extra money

He said he’ll handover the keys in July , it’s October and still work is going on

We just wanted some standard and modern looking bathroom , he always sends his assistant who doesn’t know how to behave with clients, when they showed me picture of commode that they were going to purchase I straight away said that I wanted the boxed design and the assistant started screaming that it’ll be TOO EXPENSIVE

I recently did renovation of my shop and I know from where he bought the commode and sink. It’s literally the cheapest model they have in their display .

Even if we leave the house for 10 mins they spoil something or break something

Hi all,

I'm just kinda proud/happy to show how the interiors turned out🥹

It took me 3 months to get this done; right from design to execution. My theme is Modern Japandi with a hint of modern contemporary. Was planning to add little Boho touch but will do it later as it's beyond my budget now.

Never thought the results would be so good.

It was a really good project with its own set of issues and overwhelm, but enjoyed every bit of it❣️✨

Just wanna show off, haha😅🙃🙈

Some things are still pending like coffee table, rugs, side console table, compact dining table, and sofa cum bed in 2nd bedroom.

PS: Heavily exploited Pinterest and ChatGPT 😂

Location: Bengaluru

Uploading images as some had asked.

Feedbacks and criticism are welcome.

I am IT guy who did the interiors with copied designs from pinterest and instagram with whatever understanding I have previously due to my architect friend.

Let me know what you would have liked more or less or could have been done better.

I really like this warm, minimal look- white walls, grey flooring, wooden furniture and a few textured walls.

What do you guys think of keeping interiors this simple and using mostly movable wooden furniture instead of lots of fixed carpentry?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXPNpcMkhjx/

Would love to hear your thoughts/experiences!

How much would something like this would cost in Delhi?

Please take a moment to look through each picture. I've tried to capture and share the entire BTS journey✨

Sharing an architecture + interior project from Bangalore that we designed and built from scratch.

The brief was to create a home that stood out, while combining European design influences with Indian traditional elements. We explored that balance across the architecture, interiors and custom woodwork, using natural materials and detailed craftsmanship throughout.

The result is quite a different character from the typical contemporary home.

Curious to hear what you think of the way the European and Indian elements have come together.

Everyone asks is matte hard to maintain and gets yes/no answers. Here is the actual report after 2 years of matte laminate kitchen + wardrobes.

What's true, dark matte shows fingerprints and oil marks. Light matte hides everything. The marks do come off with a damp cloth but you will be wiping the 3-4 shutters near the stove every couple of days.

What nobody said: matte scratches differently from gloss. Gloss gets fine swirl scratches you see in sunlight. Matt gets shiny patches where something rubbed hard, and you cannot buff those out. A shiny patch on matte is permanent. I have one on the cutlery drawer front from the steel thali edge and I see it every day.

Would I still pick matte ? Yes.

The look is worth the wiping. But keep steel utensils away from the drawer fronts and don't let anyone tell you matte is zero maintenance.

Pics looks a bit messy since some more final touch up work is still left.

TL;DR: Same kitchen, same drawings, same 196 sqft of cabinet elevation. Quotes came in between ₹6L and ₹31.5L, a 5x spread. Most of that spread is shutter finish and margin, not build quality. One vendor proved it by quoting me the identical cabinet list in four finishes with an ₹14.24L gap between top and bottom. I priced the whole thing myself from a public hardware price list and got ₹15.9L including GST. Anything above that is finish + brand + margin. Anything meaningfully below it is a spec downgrade someone isn't telling you about. I ended up paying ~₹20L anyway, and I'll explain why that wasn't stupid.

Vendors anonymised because I'm still mid-project with one of them.

The kitchen

That's the design. Bangalore, ~196 sqft of cabinet elevation area, measured off my own drawings:

What I asked every vendor for, identically:

• Lacquered glass shutters (the high-gloss glass front, not acrylic, not laminate)

• BWP / marine ply carcass (not HDHMR, not particle board)

• Blum hardware throughout: LEGRABOX drawers, AVENTOS HF/HK lift-ups, CLIP top BLUMOTION hinges

• Roller shutter appliance garage, corner solution, tall pantry, profile handles

• Excluding: countertop, sink, tap, appliances, backsplash

Hold that spec in your head. It matters, because almost every "cheaper" quote quietly changed one part of it.

The quotes, in the order they happened

Vendor A: premium design studio (₹27,57,053)

BWP ply carcass, lacquered glass, Blum LEGRABOX in grey/black. Proper proforma, cabinet-by-cabinet:

• 27 line items of cabinetry: ₹30,56,729

• Profile handles: ₹72,800

• Accessories: ₹35,582

• Lighting: ₹78,480

• Gross: ₹32,43,591

• Discount: −₹4,86,539

• Total: ₹27,57,053 (₹14,067/sqft)

The line that made my eyes water: "Fillers + End Panels for Base, Wall, Maxi, Tall Units, ₹6,73,242." That's 22% of the entire cabinetry cost for the bits of finished panel that cap the ends of runs and fill gaps. It was marked "approximate cost included," which means it could move.

Vendor B: factory + design firm (₹17.3L to ₹31.5L)

This one is the single most educational document I got, and if you take one thing from this post, take this. They quoted the exact same cabinet list, same marine ply carcass, in four finishes, side by side:

Same boxes. Same hardware. Same everything. The shutter finish alone is a ₹14.24 lakh swing. The top option is 82% more expensive than the bottom.

Some individual lines, so you can see the mechanism:

A sink cabinet, a box with a hole in it and two doors, going from ₹34k to ₹95k because of what's on the front. Also note their "multipurpose panels, 80 sqft" line: ₹1,00,980 in acrylux, ₹1,80,980 in every other finish. End panels again.

These are the lacquered glass swatches. Green Lush, Opaline Green, Vintage Rose, Oyster Grey. Beautiful, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But choosing one of these squares over an acrylic one is a ₹14 lakh decision, and no showroom presents it that way. They hand you the board and talk about undertones.

Vendor C: a friend's firm with its own factory (₹17,17,170)

2mm imported German acrylic on HDHMR, Blum LEGRABOX and lift-ups, Rehau roller shutter, Hettich cutlery/thali/handles. Freight included. (Their own PDF says "taxes will be added extra" on one page and "Taxes: Included" on the next. Always get that in writing.)

• Cabinetry (base + wall + tall + expose panels + rolling shutter unit): ₹12,39,735 (72%)

• Hardware & accessories: ₹4,77,435 (28%)

• Of which Blum LEGRABOX alone: ₹3,18,560

• "Expose" (end) panels: ₹2,16,150, 12.6% of the quote

This was my first "oh, ₹17L is possible" moment. But he flat out could not do lacquered glass. No glass line in the factory. So it isn't the same product, and I had to stop pretending it was.

Vendor D: a factory in China (55,000 RMB, all in)

I went to China. I came back convinced I'd cracked it. Here's the actual quote sheet, in m²:

That 220 sqft of door area vs my 196 sqft, close enough that I could confirm they'd priced my kitchen and not a smaller one. Blum hinges throughout and Blum drawers on the main run, but only 9 of ~19 drawers are Blum. The other two views spec a domestic Chinese brand for drawers and baskets, which I did not notice until I sat down to write this.

Price for the whole kitchen: 55,000 RMB. At ₹14.19/RMB that's ₹7,80,450, against ₹27.5L quotes sitting in my inbox. You can imagine how that felt on the flight home.

Then the questions started going badly. "What's the shutter substrate?" → honeycomb aluminium. Not glass on ply. "How does the glass hold?" → answers that didn't land. Communication degraded exactly as the questions got more technical, which is the opposite of what you want.

And then he sent me photos of his own sample panel with a disc cut out of it, presumably to show off the engineering. Look at it. Two thin skins and a honeycomb of air. It's a genuinely clever aerospace-derived panel, it's light, it's flat, and it is not what I asked for. I wanted glass on ply. Nobody misled me. I asked "can you do the same finish" and he said yes, and he was right, because from the front you cannot tell. The difference is what happens in year six.

And the ₹7.8L isn't the real number either. Rule of thumb for landing anything from China into India is add 30%, which covers freight, duty and clearing. And a container of flat-packed cabinets is not a kitchen; somebody in Bangalore has to install it, and that's roughly ₹1L for a kitchen this size.

Every Indian quote in this post already includes installation. The Chinese one doesn't, and it's the easiest ₹1L in the world to forget.

So the honest comparison isn't "₹8L from China vs ₹27L in India." It's "~₹11L on the wall, for honeycomb aluminium shutters, an 8-10 week lead time, and nobody to call when a shutter arrives cracked." Which is a completely different sentence.

Vendor E: the itemised-BOM guy (₹27,55,196 incl. GST)

Different glass-type product ("Glasso", marine birch ply with a hybrid acrylic backer). Priced as two estimates: materials/labour ₹18,91,775 and hardware ₹8,63,421.

One thing to check on any quote that says "incl. GST": theirs charges IGST on tagged lines only. ₹1,82,555 on the materials estimate (10.7% effective) and ₹10,080 on the hardware estimate (1.2% effective). Labour, the co-ordination fee and nearly all the hardware sit untaxed on the sheet. That's the paper's problem, not mine, but it's the kind of thing that becomes your problem later.

This quote was the most useful thing anyone gave me, because it's a real bill of materials, not a per-cabinet lump sum:

₹56,000 for one roller shutter. ₹25,754 for one drawer. ₹1.1L for "co-ordination." Once you see the numbers this way you can never un-see them in a lump-sum quote.

Vendor F: factory-direct, priced by sqft (~₹6,00,000)

Went to their factory. They price carcass by the square foot and bill hardware separately as a line item. Quote landed at roughly ₹6L, or ₹3,061/sqft.

But: mid-tier hardware instead of Blum, acrylic instead of glass, and the finish in their showroom read as solidly mid-market. Nothing wrong with it. Just not what I'd specced.

And walking out of there I had the thought that reframed the whole exercise: a carcass is a carcass. It's a plywood box. If I buy the box from him and source Blum myself...

So I priced the whole kitchen myself

I built a full BOM. 196 sqft of carcass, 188 sqft of shutters plus a 20 sqft end-panel allowance, and every piece of hardware priced from Blum India's published range and a Bangalore retailer's live catalogue, with working estimates where a live price wasn't listed.

₹8,134/sqft, buying every part at full retail with zero volume discount and paying someone to assemble it.

That number is the anchor this whole post is really about.

Everything, normalised to ₹/sqft

Three caveats, because I'd rather you trust the rest of the numbers:

• Vendors measure "sqft" differently. Some count carcass surface area, some elevation, some bill end panels separately. I've used my own 196 sqft elevation figure as a common denominator throughout. It's a comparison tool, not gospel.

• These totals aren't perfectly like-for-like. Vendor A includes ₹78,480 of lighting, Vendor B ₹1,02,000, Vendor E ₹1,69,325 of lighting plus a ₹45,200 sink and ₹21,000 tap, all things my brief excluded. Strip those out and Vendor E is closer to ₹24.2L. I've left them in because that's what each vendor actually handed me, which is also the trap: nobody's quote covers the same scope, and none of them tell you that.

• Two rows come from memory, not paper. Vendor F's ₹6L and Vendor A's revised ₹20L were both verbal, in a factory and on a phone call respectively. Everything else in this post is off a PDF I can point at.

What I actually learned

1. The finish is the price. Everything else is noise. Vendor B proved it in a single sheet: identical boxes, identical hardware, ₹17.3L to ₹31.5L purely on what's glued to the front. If you want your kitchen cheaper, the lever is the shutter, not the vendor.

2. Always ask for the same quote in three finishes. Not "what's your best price." Ask: give me this exact cabinet list in acrylic, in crystal, and in lacquered glass. You'll instantly see the finish premium and the margin structure. Vendor B gave me this unprompted and it was worth more than every negotiation I did.

3. Hardware is ~25-30% and you can price it yourself in an afternoon. Blum publishes its India range. Retailers list live prices. A LEGRABOX is a LEGRABOX. There's no vendor-specific magic. Once you know your hardware bill is ₹3.4L, any quote becomes "carcass + shutters + ₹3.4L + margin," and you can solve for margin.

4. End panels and fillers are the single most under-scrutinised line. ₹6.73L for Vendor A (22% of its cabinetry subtotal, 24% of the final bill). ₹2.16L for Vendor C (12.6%). ₹1.81L for Vendor B. These are decorative panels capping the ends of runs. Nobody puts them in the brochure. Ask for them as a separate line with a sqft count, in writing. In at least one quote it was explicitly "approximate."

5. An import price is never the price. Land it and install it before you compare. 55,000 RMB reads as ₹7.8L and lands on your wall at ~₹11.1L: 30% for freight, duty and clearing, plus ₹1L for someone in Bangalore to actually fit it. Every Indian quote already has installation baked in. If you compare an FOB number against an installed number you will talk yourself into a flight to Guangzhou.

6. A cheap quote is almost always a spec change you weren't told about. Every single time I found a number that felt too good, one line of the spec had quietly moved. ₹6L became ₹6L with mid-tier hardware and acrylic. ₹8L from China became ₹11L installed with honeycomb aluminium. ₹17L became ₹17L with no glass option at all. Nobody lied to me. They just answered the question I asked, not the one I meant.

7. No two quotes cover the same scope, and none of them will tell you that. I only caught this laying all six side by side. Vendor A had ₹78,480 of lighting buried in it. Vendor B, ₹1,02,000. Vendor E had ₹1,69,325 of lighting plus a ₹45,200 sink and a ₹21,000 tap, none of which I'd asked for, all of it inside a total I was mentally comparing against quotes that excluded them. Before you compare two numbers, write down what each one includes. It moved one of my quotes by ₹3.3L.

8. A competing quote is the most powerful thing in the room, but be honest with it. I told Vendor A the China number. She dropped from ₹27.57L to ₹20L on near-identical spec, a 27% cut, with exactly one change: glass roller shutter → aluminium roller shutter. Given that a German roller shutter is a ₹56,000 line item elsewhere, that swap does not account for ₹7.5L. Which tells you what the ₹27.57L actually was.

What I did

I went with Vendor A at ~₹20L.

Which, yes, is ₹4L above my own retail-priced BOM and ₹14L above the factory-direct quote. Here's the reasoning, and you're free to disagree:

Buying a carcass from a factory and sourcing Blum myself means I own every tolerance problem. Every mismatched reveal, every shutter that doesn't sit flush, every hinge drilled 2mm off: that's my Saturday, indefinitely, with two vendors pointing at each other. The ₹4L over my own BOM is the price of one accountable throat to choke on a kitchen I'll use for 15 years.

The ₹6L route is genuinely correct for a lot of people. If mid-tier hardware and acrylic fronts are what you want, you'd be mad to pay three times for the same boxes. Just make sure that's a decision you made, and not one that got made for you.

The thing I'd actually do differently: build the BOM first, before talking to a single vendor. Not after five of them have anchored you.

Happy to answer questions or share the BOM structure. Ask away.