With the Choksi apartment, architect Kapil Gupta establishes his talent for creating low-clutter, elegant spaces, even in the midst of the congestion of Mumbai.
“All my work tries to engage the ideas of the city and translate those impulses into interesting projects,” says architect Kapil Gupta of Contemporary Urban. “Each space is a collage of objects, most of which have either decorative or functional characteristics. But these objects, also often lead to a visual clutter.”
One of Gupta’s endeavours that ably reflect his design philosophy is an apartment belonging to the Choksi family, one of the few earlier projects he undertook on his return from studies abroad. “Here, I experimented with the furniture. I took disparate elements and blended them into a single piece of furniture,” points out Gupta, “which means, that 1 piece of furniture performs and functions in a way that maybe 2 or 3 pieces would have done in a traditional interior. This cuts down the clutter.”
The master bedroom, for instance, has a wooden side-table that turns into a bed, which turns into the wooden ceiling that has light fixtures embedded in it. Similarly, in the blue bedroom, occupied by a stock broker who moonlights as a DJ, the bed turns into a wall, which turns into a side-table, then a ceiling, and on the other side, into a DJ console.
All the edges are lit in each room. The living room has a canary yellow wrap that runs about 4 inches away from the wall, and is constructed out of thick ply clad with laminate and reinforced with steel. In the study, a red sofa on one end wraps all over the ceiling, and ends up as a writing table on the other end.
In the living room, there is a beam going right through the walls. Since he could not remove the beam as it supports the structure, Gupta has covered it with wood. The plywood-laminate surface goes right around this beam.
“The Choksi house had been done up partly when we were called in,” Gupta adds. “So it was like walking into a space, and inserting these pieces of furniture. We describe these fixtures as furniture. Though it is fixed, it performs the role of disparate pieces of furniture. It also helps in getting rid of the clutter.”
