The silk saree route

Inspired by the women who live here, By The Riverside crafts a Bengaluru home

14 Aug 2025

ELLE DECOR

In South Indian households, function often shapes beauty. The rooms are filled with furniture that has stayed in the family. Doors are heavy with carved wood. Brass vessels sit on ledges, silk sarees, the kind worn daily and folded carefully into cupboards lined with sandalwood. When By The Riverside’s team visited the family in Bengaluru, they saw a home already in motion. And took their cues from what they saw. “The journey began without a defined brief or theme. But the clues were all around—in the silk sarees the woman of the house wore to work each day, in their collection of antique furniture, and in the way they carried their heritage with quiet pride,” shares Swati Seraan, principal designer of the studio. Brick was laid along the ceiling, silk was stitched into wardrobes, and the heirloom furniture remained where it had always been.

DRAPE AND DETAIL

This home settles around you with the softness of a silk saree worn daily. Entering the 3,000 sq ft space feels like being wrapped in an heirloom saree: rich in texture, colour, and unmistakably personal. Vintage sarees were deftly refashioned into wardrobe inlays, upholstery, and layers of soft furnishings. The fabrics came from the family’s own cupboard—sarees worn to work, to weddings, and to quiet mornings at home. They were folded, cut, and stitched into panels, cushions, and coverings. Their jewel tones—indigo, peacock green, gold, and rust—offer a material continuity that ties rooms together like a well-worn pallu.

“It’s a home shaped, as it always was, by the women who live in it — strong, graceful, and deeply connected to where they come from”

Swati Seraan of By The Riverside

In the carved-out reading nook, light filters softly through wooden blinds, falling onto dusky rose walls and a library’s worth of dog-eared books; Photography by Nayan Soni

BRICK BY BRICK

Every material used in this house has precedent in South Indian domestic architecture. The most modest of South Indian vernacular elements, bricks, are rearticulated in ceiling borders and laid in alternating bonds—stack, herringbone and free form—creating rhythm throughout the space. Timber remains unvarnished in its grace (and grain) framing the home’s furnishing. This use of wood recalls the spatial logic of Chettinad homes, where carved pillars and solid joinery were used for structure and shade. Brass comes in through habit, it’s on coffee filter handles, window latches, prayer lamps, and cupboard locks—things still in use, still in place.

In this Bengaluru apartment Swati Seraan and her team at By The Riverside have stitched in the memory of Chettinad households. You could be sitting in the carved-out reading nook by the window, surrounded by soft pink walls and a library’s worth of books. Or lounging in the bedroom, textured like a bowl of warm payasam—simple, rich, and quietly generous—with wooden furniture, saree-wrapped wardrobes in opulent pinks, and a peacock cresting the headboard. A mirror down the hallway catches the same jewel tones in its frame. The living room holds onto its wooden warmth and its art. In every corner, the ornate quality of Chettinad makes itself felt and remembered. “It’s a home shaped, as it always was, by the women who live in it — strong, graceful, and deeply connected to where they come from,” as Swati describes it.

Now read: This Hyderabad home by Sona Reddy celebrates colours of everyday