For nine of our first ten years, we specified Italian. Calacatta on the kitchen islands, Statuario in the master baths, Carrara where the client could not tell the difference. We told ourselves it was about the veining. We knew it was about the invoice.

In 2023, a client asked us — gently, but firmly — to take her to a quarry in Rajasthan before specifying anything for her kitchen. She had grown up in Udaipur. Her father had built a haveli there. She wanted Makrana, she said. She did not want our opinion. She wanted to know whether we could deliver it well.

We went. We brought back three slabs, in different white tones, with veining we could not have imagined. And we built the kitchen she asked for, in Indian marble we had previously dismissed.

Six months later, we walked through the home with her on a humid May afternoon. The Italian marble we had used three years earlier in another client's bathroom — and that we had been quietly worried about — was beginning to yellow at the edges. The Makrana, in the same humidity, was unchanged.

That afternoon, we redrew our material policy.

What we had wrong

Italian marble is a beautiful product, exquisitely calibrated to European interiors. But Hyderabad is not Milan. The humidity here ranges from 30% in February to 85% in July. The dust is finer and more iron-rich. The water is harder. None of this matters in a magazine photograph. All of it matters in a home that someone has to live in for thirty years.

Indian marble — Makrana especially, but also Vyara, Ambaji, Onyx Green, Black Marquina from Andhra — has been quarried, cut, and laid in Indian humidity for over a thousand years. It has had a thousand years to learn how to age in this country. Italian marble has had to be taught.

Restraint is going to the source, asking what works, and being patient enough to listen. We were not patient for a long time.

What we specify now

We start with Indian. We move to Italian only when the client has seen and rejected the Indian option, or when the design specifically asks for something the Indian quarries do not produce — a particular green-grey, a particular kind of vein. This is rarer than we used to think.

We also visit the quarry. Once, before the project. The slabs we choose are tagged, photographed, and reserved in our name. The client receives a photograph of the actual slab going into their home, taken in the quarry yard, before it is cut. This took us a year to arrange. It has changed how clients see the material — and how the quarry treats us.

What we tell ourselves

Restraint is not refusing the good material for the better-known one. Restraint is going to the source, asking what works, and being patient enough to listen. We were not patient for a long time. We are trying to be now.

There is a kalash in Mahesh's grandmother's home — a small brass water vessel — that she received as part of her wedding trousseau in 1962. It has been used every morning for sixty-three years. It is now a soft, mottled gold, with patina so even and dignified that it looks designed. It was not designed to age this way. It was designed to be used.

We think about that kalash often.

The brief

A client asks for “rose gold hardware.” Or “matte black.” Or, more recently, “champagne with brushed edges.” These finishes — almost without exception — are PVD-coated stainless steel. They look identical on day one. They begin to chip in the second year. They are replaced in the fifth.

We have, for eleven years, declined this brief. We specify unlacquered brass, or solid brass with a thin satin clear-coat. The hardware costs three to four times more. It also lasts indefinitely, and improves visibly every year.

What patina is, properly

Patina is not corrosion. Corrosion eats the metal. Patina is a layer of oxidation that protects the metal beneath — a chemical seal the brass forms with the air and the hands that touch it. A handle that is grasped twenty times a day becomes smoother and warmer in colour over years. A handle that is rarely touched darkens to a deeper bronze. The hardware learns the home it lives in.

Lacquered brass — the kind sold pre-finished, sealed in clear coating — never develops this patina. It looks pristine for two years and then the coating cracks and the metal beneath darkens unevenly. The piece looks unwell.

Unlacquered brass, polished once at installation and never again, looks magnificent at thirty years.

The materials we are most proud of are not the ones photographed for the launch. They are the ones our clients send us photos of, ten years later, without prompting.

What we have learned

Materials and families are similar. The ones that are used carefully, lived with rather than worshipped, that are allowed to age — those are the ones that look the most beautiful after a long time.

A handle. A faucet. A drawer pull. The patina is the proof.

For our first six years, we drew lighting last. The architect drew the floor plan. The interior designer specified materials and furniture. The MEP consultant ran ceiling layouts based on whatever made sense for the conduits. The lighting, somehow, was always the final layer — a layer we added once everything else was settled.

In 2020, we stopped doing this. We now draw lighting first.

What we noticed

A floor plan is a map of how people will walk. But people do not walk in lines. They drift toward the brightest corner of a room. They pause where the light pools. They gather where the lamps are warm. Lighting, more than walls, decides how a room is actually used.

If you draw the lighting plan before the floor plan — if you decide, first, where the pools of warmth should be — you discover that the walls almost draw themselves. The lighting tells you where the conversation pit goes. Where the reading chair belongs. How the kitchen island should be oriented. Whether the dining table should be against a window or in the centre of the room.

We did not invent this. Tadao Ando draws this way. Peter Zumthor draws this way. We are simply learning, late, what the masters knew first.

Light is the first material in any home, and the last to be noticed. We try, now, to give it the time it deserves.

How we draw it now

Three layers, in order:

Ambient — the background level of the room. Low, indirect, almost not noticed. This is the layer most people get wrong; they make it too bright, and the room loses depth. Our ambient layer is usually 80 to 120 lux. Magazine photographs require 300 to 600 lux. Living a life requires 80 to 120.

Task — the focused light over the things people will do. The reading lamp by the chair. The pendant over the kitchen island. The makeup mirror in the dressing room. These are bright (200 to 400 lux), warm (2700K), and positioned with precision.

Accent — the lights that punctuate. The wall washer that grazes a textured wall. The picture light over a frame. The recessed strip under a floating console. These are rarely on at full intensity. They suggest depth without announcing themselves.

What changes for the client

When a client sees a lighting plan before they see the floor plan, something settles in them. They understand the home as a place of evenings — soft, layered, warm — rather than as a place of plans. They stop asking about square footage and start asking about light. We have not had a client request “more downlights” since the day we started drawing this way.

Light is the first material in any home, and the last to be noticed. We try, now, to give it the time it deserves.