Interior architect Kunal Shah’s tryst with Art Deco began as a plaything before it moved into a more serious subject of enquiry. Having spent many guileless evenings as a child at his grandparents’ Breach Candy home, Sea Face Park, he remembers circling the round pillars, playing hide-and-seek in the verandah, and jumping from the red terrazzo flooring onto the yellow tiles, curious about how far he could leap. The memory of that lost time became more vivid as he started pursuing architecture and interior design. Spending a winter afternoon in the front yard of Kapur Mahal on Marine Drive, with his grand-aunt Kusum Shah, the daughter of the wealthy merchant Kapurchand who built the Art Deco structure, he learnt about the small joys of sipping on homemade sherbet made from starfruit grown in her courtyard.

Shah later went on to pursue a design course in London, because of the certain disenchantment he felt with the architectural projects he was witnessing. Most of the houses he saw didn’t grow with people. “I started thinking about what styles and ways of living allow you to grow with your home, and the home to grow with you,” he recalls.