Focus: What Makes A Living Space Great And Luxurious?

By Reema Mehta | INN Live

Of all the things we write about in Indulge on a regular basis, luxury living space is the one that I find hardest to wrap my head around.

For most of my life, I grew up thinking of any living space as luxury. Anything at all. Around three decades ago, my family pooled together all our savings and built a small little house on the outskirts of Thrissur. I am not being modest. It really is a small house. You can buy grotty little flats in Ghaziabad these days with greater carpet area and high ceilings. 
The rooms in our house are all squashed right up next to each other and there isn’t a single square centimetre of wasted space anywhere. Look behind a door and odds are you’ll see the washing machine or a store room or the inverter battery cabinet. And yet my father takes care of it as if it were Hampton Court Palace.

There isn’t a shred of space, vertical or horizontal, that he hasn’t worked and reworked and decorated and redecorated in the last three decades.

But was all this luxury? Shouldn’t there be something more…glamourous about it? I always wondered.

There are several stories on luxury spaces in this issue. All were commissioned independently and written in isolation. Yet, somehow, there is one theme that kept popping up in all of them. From the interview with Trevor Horne to the Indulge guide to the top 10 trends in contemporary luxury interiors: the individual. 

What defines the greatness and the luxury of a space, it appears, is not just what it is made of, how big it is, how fashionable it is or even how expensive it is. But how it is an extension of the personality that occupies it. Horne told me how he liked designing homes for artists because they always wanted to deeply personalize the space they lived and worked in. “Everything was part of a larger creative plan,” he said.

Interior designer Sidhant Lamba kept coming back to personal choice and personal preference in this trend-spotting article. By all means, paint your space with broad brushes of trends and textures and colours. But always, always punctuate the space with signature objects and finishes. Disrupt things just a little. So the space belongs to you and to nobody else.

That, then, is perhaps the definition of a luxurious space. A space that you own not only in terms of deeds and duties, but also spiritually and aesthetically. My dad always knew this. I know this now.