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In the heart of the city, an old home is reimagined as a working studio filled with art, antiques and the lived-in warmth that defines architect Faisal Manzur’s design sensibility
When Faisal Manzur went looking for a studio space in Chennai, he didn’t expect to find it the way most great real estate stories in a movie begin—in the rain, while driving aimlessly, when an elderly woman outside a house just happened to be putting up a “To Let” board. “I just couldn’t find anything for so long before that moment,” he says, still sounding a little amazed. The post-colonial house had good bones, built by four friends who once worked at the State Bank of India nearly 78 years ago. Four identical single-dwelling units had been tweaked and twisted over the years as their families grew.
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.”
When Faisal first moved in, parts of the old house, predictably, needed serious work but he followed a quiet kind of restoration logic: Keep what’s worth keeping; match what doesn’t; and redo only what you must.
“The toilet in my room needed a lot of renovation so we just made a new one,” he says. And other parts of the home, had already been redone by the previous owners—specifically the terrazzo floors, which were covered in vitrified tiles. They are now covered with red micro-concrete, to echo the vernacular of old Madras homes.
“At the back of the house, where the floor hadn’t been changed, we left it as is.” The windows, originally Burma teak, had been painted yellow, then green, then blue. “We scraped all that off to bring it back to the original wood, including the paint on the old wooden rafters.” The back of the house was an open terrace before being enclosed many years ago. “The grills were different at the back,” he says. “I didn’t like them, so we recreated the original grills from the front of the house and replaced the new ones. That kind of thing matters to me.”
A team of ten works here now, spread across rooms that were once bedrooms and hallways. The rooms are all small, each with its own use and not one of them is doing what it was originally intended to do—filled with desks, books, ledges, samples and a rotating cast of artworks. The layout is improvised but intentional, with spaces for collaboration, focussed solo contemplation and client meetings. The old entrance with its balcony is now a reading nook behind a rattan-wrapped partition. Faisal’s room, in the middle, doubles as the space for client meetings. A TV is mounted on a custom lift because, in his words, “I value my paintings more than a screen for presentations.”
“The last room, which we call the lounge, is where we sit and have all sorts of meetings and short breaks,” he says. Work is structured but flexible. People mostly sit where their systems are set up, but everything moves when it needs to. “I don’t believe in work-from-home, but I do want the office to feel like a home,” he says.
Much of the furniture was originally designed by Faisal as samples for client projects, test pieces to work out proportions and finishes that eventually made their way into the studio. He’s currently working on a full-fledged furniture line, so much of what you see here might soon be up for grabs. Other pieces are sourced from Pondicherry, Mumbai and Karaikudi, a Chettinad town in Tamil Nadu that’s become his go-to for antiques and furniture.
There’s no shortage of things we’d shamelessly like to smuggle home—paintings, odd little sculptures, dramatic lighting and a long wooden seat in olive-green velvet with a scalloped backrest. There’s a Floatation pendant light by Ingo Maurer hanging overhead, Art Deco lamps and a crystal chandelier, because why not.
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.
The studio is also packed with art. Hanging above ledges, flanking doorways, tucked beside windows and covering nearly every wall. Faisal rotates the works often—sometimes to refresh the space, sometimes because he’s found something new and can’t help himself. “I may not have a lot of money in my bank account,” he says, “but I’ve spent all of it on art. That’s my problem.” His team, by now, is used to the constant rearrangements. “They work around it.”
Among the works are pieces by F.N. Souza, Manjit Bawa, Rajendra Dhawan, Rekha Rodwittiya, Jogen Chowdhury and a piece by Saubiya Chasmawala with overlapping Arabic script that sits opposite his desk. “The letters have no meaning,” he says. “It’s just these beautiful forms. It looks stunning with my antique Garuda sculpture.”
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.”
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.”
It doesn’t have to be Indian-ethnic, he says. “I gravitate to anything old-school—mid-century modern, Japanese minimalism, French classical. I love Geoffrey Bawa’s work for exactly that reason. You can feel the cultural context without it being heavy.”
That instinct for balance runs through his projects, which include holiday villas, contemporary apartments, commercial spaces and restaurants, many in and around Chennai. They share a certain calm and clarity. “We work closely with our clients,” he says. “Every project is about understanding who they are. Their personality always comes through. We don’t impose ours – but we bring in our way of seeing, our love for art, for history, for texture.” Sometimes, that process starts with a single painting. “A lot of our work starts with picking the art,” he says. “Because the art says something. It sets the tone.”
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
Will you be living in your space during the renovation ?
DEC 2023
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17 Oct 23, 03.00PM - 04.00PM