A Chennai home that became a design studio

What started with just three rooms is now a seven-room studio on the first floor, with a private entrance, while the ground floor is still residential. “When we started, the landlord was living at the back. It was just one small room and a slightly larger one where I sat, plus a pantry and one toilet,” Faisal says. “A year and a half later, she moved to Madurai and we extended into the back.”

The extension came with a full dose of renovation stress. “One moment, we were working, clients were coming in and the next, we’d go back to how we used to work—from home or in cafés. Or we’d finish one room and all cram into it for a week. Then shift again the next week. Somehow, we pulled it off. But I really hope we don’t have to do it again.”

None of it is overly staged and Faisal doesn’t make a big deal out of it. “We used to have nice-looking mid-century chairs,” he says. “But they weren’t practical. So now we have caster chairs.” The space feels like it was built to be used, not photographed.

Some of the works he holds closest are by his mother, Triveni Manzur, an abstract painter originally from Coorg. “She’s the reason I’m a designer today,” he says. “She used to rotate art around the house all the time. She’s reduced the scale of what she does now, but her work is still here.”

He also sources art and antiques from across the country. He’s not joking when he says his antique suppliers, Ramesh and Mahesh in Pondicherry, are constantly sending him photos of pieces on WhatsApp. He’s always on the hunt while travelling. “Sometimes I get into trouble at airports,” he says, “Carrying objects that don’t quite fit in hand baggage.”

Design that Doesn’t Try Too Hard

If there’s a common thread running through Faisal’s work, it’s a quiet resistance to over-design. His practice blends modern design with traditional techniques, favouring local materials, craftspeople and layered storytelling over trend or spectacle. It leans toward a sensibility that’s hard to summarise in a neat phrase, but he tries, anyway: “traditionalising the modern.”

A Practice Rooted in Memory

The Chennai he grew up in is somewhere in there too. Growing up in Anna Nagar, he’d visit his neighbour every morning—Padma aunty, who would draw kolam in her courtyard, brew strong filter coffee and listen to Suprabhatam on the radio. “I was five or six, and I’d run into her house every morning,” he says. “She’s the reason I have a filter coffee obsession.”

That quiet culture—rituals, rhythms, objects that carry memory—has stayed with him. And it carries through to the studio too, where each morning begins with filter coffee and mallipoo, a strand of jasmine flowers, placed by his beloved Garuda. “When clients walk in, it’s the first thing they see. The smell. The mood. It sets the tone,” he says. “They immediately get a sense of who we are, without any formal presentation. The studio tells you who we are.”

Not a bad result from a house spotted in the rain.

All images by Ritesh Uttamchandani