‘Art Collection Apartment’ can now officially become a home design category, thanks to this lovely project realised by Rajiv Saini & Associates in Mumbai
A-list art collection holds centre-stage at this apartment in Mumbai, designed with admirable elegance by Rajiv Saini & Associates. This display is ably supported by iconic furniture pieces. But since this was a home and not an art gallery, the Rajiv Saini-led design team used a neutral palette of pale grey and white, with wood and veneer accents, to build a warm backdrop to the priceless art. The flooring, too, is sublime, decked in a light-grey customised terrazzo.
“When these clients contacted me through common friends, they were already familiar with my style of work. They gave me carte blanche to redesign this home, which had last been renovated in the late 80s,” says Rajiv Saini. “They had been buying art for many years…that their collection would have to be curated, was evident. It just wasn’t possible to display it all, unless we started using the ceiling for this purpose as well,” he laughs.
At the entrance to this south Mumbai pad, Saini and team took off an earlier wall that had been giving the space a hemmed-in feel, and replaced it with suspended copper-shuttered cabinets sitting atop vertical wooden “fins.” In a pairing of the old and the new, some of the furniture was customised, while other pieces are classics which go back five or six decades. “Even where we’ve used contemporary pieces such as the Hans Wegner chairs and the CH 28 chairs by Wegner were designed many decades back and the ‘Track’ daybed by Piero Lissoni, I can see them becoming classics in a few years,” says Rajiv Saini.
Replete with internationally recognisable furniture, the iconic pieces in this apartment nevertheless decline firmly to compete with all the high-voltage art looking down from the walls. If art collections necessarily bristle with a complex psychology, this is a quiet home which unfolds its treasures in layers, meant for the discerning eye of connoisseurs.
