Designer Huzefa Rangwala's home reveals itself through memory

Much of the home reveals itself through the easy banter between Huzefa and his sister, Tasneem. He instinctively answers a question before pausing so she can find her footing; she gently interrupts him to correct a detail he has embellished. He proudly recounts the mountain expeditions she has completed, adding with the admiration only an older brother can disguise as humour, "That's an extra flex." When she accuses him of making them his "worst clients" while designing the house, he immediately laughs, "No, I was my worst client." Stories drift between memories of their mother, who would recruit Tasneem to broker family design debates, and recollections of growing up together, each anecdote punctuated by another interruption, another correction, another laugh. Between teasing and finishing one another's sentences lies the unmistakable shorthand of people who have spent decades sharing the same rooms. By the end of the conversation, it feels as though the home itself has inherited that cadence.

Every Room Has Enough to Do

Curiously, the thread that stayed with me wasn't a piece of furniture, an artwork or one of the many objects Huzefa speaks about with affection. It was a bird. Or rather, several birds. Tasneem is mother to six budgies, or lovebirds as they are more popularly known.

They appeared almost incidentally in our conversation, yet refused to remain incidental. Spoken about with the familiarity reserved for family members, they move freely between rooms, punctuating quiet afternoons with movement and becoming companions to the humans around them while quietly enacting rituals that have become part of the home's daily rhythm. The birds gradually stopped feeling like charming details and began to feel like members of the household. As Huzefa puts it, "You don't feel you're by yourself... your friends are these things around you. They keep you company even when you're by yourself." Their presence isn't ornamental; it is woven into the rhythm of the household. "The birds are always here," he says as a simple observation that lingers as a reminder that intimacy within a home is often shaped by every living presence that insists on belonging.

Perhaps that is another way of understanding a home. Not simply through the people who live within it, but through every living thing that quietly insists on belonging.

Architects often speak about designing for the movement of bodies. In the way a shoulder turns around a curve, how a passage slows your pace before opening into another room, or how light gently redirects your gaze. 

Huzefa speaks about light less as illumination than atmosphere. Most evenings begin with only twenty percent of the lights switched on. The glow of the television becomes another source of warmth, while the rest of the home settles into soft amber tones. Bright white light is reserved only for the kitchen and his mother's room which are spaces where work still continues. Huzefa laughs as he recalls his mother's unwavering preference for bright white light, joking that it made the rest of the home feel "too clinical, like a hospital." So, everywhere else, the family settled on a softer amber glow that allows evening to arrive gently. Even this decision becomes another story of the siblings finishing one another's sentences. "I made sure," Tasneem interjects when Huzefa begins taking the credit, prompting him to quickly amend with a grin, "Okay, she made sure." It is a tiny exchange, but one that captures how the house came together through affectionate negotiation rather than the act of singular authorship.

The best spaces acknowledge that our bodies rarely move in straight lines. Listening to Huzefa, I realised memory behaves in much the same way. It rarely travels from one point to the next. Instead, it circles back, lingers where love has settled, and gradually reveals what comes next.

Huzefa describes it simply: "Every room has enough to do." It is an unusual way to speak about a home, and perhaps the most intriguing. Nothing here is merely looked at. A chair invites conversation before it offers a place to sit. A cabinet asks you to linger over what it holds. A swing slows the body into stillness. The birds insist on their evening hour of flight, and somewhere a television glows softly while dinner waits. Even solitude feels occupied. Every room offers another way to participate in the life unfolding within it, making the house feel less like a collection of spaces than a living companion.

Objects That Continue the Conversation

The interiors resist arriving all at once. The dining table sits like a quiet monolith in terrazzo, softened by chairs whose marquetry birds appear to converse with one another, each caught in a tiny theatrical moment of curiosity, indifference or amusement. Above them hangs an alabaster light that quietly gathers the family together over and over again. Elsewhere, walls finished in tactile lime plaster catch the changing light throughout the day, while objects collected across years settle into place without ever feeling arranged, every piece quietly inhabiting its place as though it arrived there through memory rather than intention.

Perhaps nowhere is Huzefa's imagination more visible than beneath the living room itself.

We ask him about the rug.

The rug that completes the primary sitting area is called Hikaya, meaning a fable. It begins with a border inspired by Greek and Persian rug traditions before unfolding into an impossibly whimsical story: koi fish circling a slice of lime, a moon sipping lemonade through a straw, birds perched above, a tortoise watering a tree with lemonade, rabbits growing from its branches, and a thought bubble in which the tortoise finally wins the race against the hare. It is deliberately absurd, and Huzefa delights in that absurdity. "It's a fable," he says. "Fables are allowed to be strange, playful and a little insane."

"The only thing that came from the old home to the new home was my mom, my sister and me," Huzefa says. "We just wanted to create new memories."

It is perhaps the clearest expression of this house being a gentle beginning, again.

Perhaps that is why nothing here feels ornamental. "Nothing is just placed here," Huzefa reflects. "Everything has a story behind it."