Designer Saswati Guptaa’s home in Faridabad showcases some striking features designed from discarded materials, says Abhilasha Ojha
Those are betel nuts that have been arranged on the onyx glass. The look has been accentuated by a banana leaf pattern finished in gold,” points out interior designer Saswati Guptaa, as we lean forward to examine a dining table. Guptaa’s home in Faridabad is an extension of her design aesthetics — the same sensibility, she points out, that has gone into the designing of some interesting spaces in her other projects; homes, offices and hotels.
Everything at Guptaa’ s residence, we are told, has been designed by she and her husband, both interior designers. The Guptaas specialise in creating interesting, new looks using a lot of recycled or waste material: For instance, we spot a coffee table in the living room that has been assembled using old glass panels that had been removed from the house when it was being rebuilt by the Guptaas. And there is a centre table in a gamely mix of faux leather and wood that is also striking.
On the other hand, it is the dining table that possibly gets the maximum attention in the house. “The idea was to use muted lights that reflect off the onyx and create an illusion of the stones and the gold foil floating in water. The betel nuts, in fact, give an impression of pebbles,” Guptaa elaborates.
“Wood, greenery and warmth are the key elements in my home,” she says, as I take a closer look at a wooden panel that rests on a part of the ceiling in the living room. What’s interesting here is that instead of highlighting the space with either textured walls or bold wall colours, or, for that matter, some blue chip art, Guptaa has simply interspersed wood and Travertine stone to create an interesting panel.
Other areas also exhibit the designer’s fascination with reusing materials: window frames that should have been discarded (once Guptaa decided to change the entire structure of the house to include large, sheer glass windows) weren’t. “I couldn’t have thrown these away. They were so pretty,” she exclaims. So she did the unthinkable. She suspended these frames from different corners, in front of the glass windows, to create a conversation starter. With greenery and natural light filtering into the room from the windows forming the backdrop, these turn out to be the highlights of the space.
Guptaa’s magic mantra is simple: Reuse simple, inexpensive materials as far as possible to create an “aura” of grandeur in your home. That’s also why she uses wallpaper so sparingly. “Using too much of it would be costly. I like highlighting maybe just one area or one side of the wall while leaving the other sides in basic colours of beige and cream,” she says, adding that she advises her “rich, moneyed clients who want to throw a lot of money and want glass, steel and lots of wallpaper all over the house” to use their budgets wisely.
Her own room is an example of this philosophy: One side of the wall is covered with wallpaper in green; in the centre of this area is a delicate-looking but large, white wooden frame sans glass. Hung inside this empty frame (set against the green wall) are tiny framed photographs. The impression is that of a large frame holding together a collage!
Though Guptaa’s is not a very large home, it is unique because of the varied elements that come together in it, often dramatically. In the main living area, there’s a carved panel in stone (“We went through many before selecting this one,” the designer says), representing the “earth element” that “roots all design in totality”, as she says. The panel was carved in Jaipur before being installed at the residence, and Guptaa feels that it looked just right for the space, conveying a sense of the spiritual as well as her own love for “nature and warmth”.
What I also find fascinating are tiny pebbles that run through a complete section of the flooring. This particular area, near the dining hall, has a cut mirror on to which a neat row of numerous pebbles have been pressed together by silicon. The pebbles are spread on a mirror sheet, under which LED tubelights have been assembled. “It’s zero maintenance and looks super,” she smiles, while ushering us into another area with the same concept. This area once had a staircase going down to the basement. Now, it has been transformed using a combination of wooden flooring and bamboo plants. (Guptaa uses wooden flooring sparingly and the house has different flooring options, ranging from Italian marble to tiles to wooden strips).
Meanwhile, our gaze rests on another spectacular piece in the living room: It’s an old, hollow, dried tree trunk on which an artist has painted characters from a Jataka tale, using vegetable dyes. “My home may have different elements but the design unifies these to create a look that’s warm, inviting and very zen,” emphasises Guptaa.
Truly, there’s a zen-like calm to the house.
