Print exclusive: This home is not staged

Akshat Bhatt’s home in New Delhi pares back ornamentation in favour of light and precision

12 Nov 2025

There’s a certain clarity to Akshat Bhatt’s house that resists easy categorisation. It is not a manifesto dressed as architecture, nor a soft-focus family portrait. It sits somewhere else, perhaps at the intersection of technical precision and lived informality, shaped by a restless mind more interested in asking questions than presenting a final image. For someone whose practice is defined by control, his home, where he lives with his parents alongside his partner and fellow architect Sneha Gurjar, is fast, frugal (frugal is relative, you will soon find out) and personal. The duo ensured that the project was built in a record period of 11 months. There are no false ceilings and decorative surfaces. Five rules anchor the material palette: no exposed concrete, no kota, no kadappa, no exposed brick and no Italian marble. Instead, floors are finished in Indian marble that cost 20 INR per square feet. The walls are treated with a textured paint finish that deliberately avoids the precision of his otherwise immaculate projects at Architecture Discipline. A technical and aesthetic choice to build robustly, quickly, and intelligently, do not mistake the finishes for fetishising materials. The materials and suppliers were determined purely for speed of delivery and execution, for efficiency, consistency and availability over indulgence. The result is a calm, silent and neutral material palette that holds the architecture rather than competing with it, while allowing light and proportion to lead.

“Height, light and space are the real luxuries here”

— Akshat Bhatt

The sprawling home in New Delhi was realised in just eleven months, a testament to intelligent planning and streamlined construction. Here, efficiency is a guiding architectural principle rather than a compromise; Photography by Ishita Sitwala

“This was a low complexity project because of the approach to the program, simple materials, and refined techniques,” says Akshat. His architectural thinking is forged in the friction between reverence and critique. As a student, he was electrified by Coop Himmelb(l)au’s rooftop extension. “It was like discovering progressive metal music,” he recalls. Piano’s lyricism, Rogers’ structure, Foster’s systemic clarity: these became his intellectual scaffolding, not as idols but as reference points. “Everybody’s trying to be a Siza, when we need to be Grimshaw or Foster,” he says, “It’s the technocrats that have to solve our problems, not the beautifiers. And there is beauty in technocracy as well.” His take on Siza is telling: “I admire the scale and detail, it’s like a letter written in prose, I wouldn’t write like that today just as I wouldn’t build like that today.”

On Gehry, his distinction is sharper, “Gehry’s work ends at finding new form. To me, what Jean Nouvel did with Parc de la Villette, or what OMA has done, is real deconstruction.” These references mark his distance from both the heavy-handed contextualism that still pervades Indian architecture, and the hollow icon-making of globalised design. Akshat rejects formal symmetry and visual alignment. He borrows from Richter’s relaxed details, allowing elements to seem assembled, moved, or adjusted, without losing rigour. The lintels are intentionally mismatched, a deliberate disruption that frees the eye from linear alignment, allowing the vision to travel, carrying movement through the architecture instead of containing it symmetrically.

Muslin drapes with leather piping from Tulio calmly frame the glazing, drawing the eye toward the greens beyond. At the far end, a red side table by AKFD and a striped credenza, designed by Architecture Discipline and crafted by Ahuja Furnishers, introduce moments of colour and texture to animate the living space; Photography by Ishita Sitwala

In the bedroom, light, height, and space take centre stage with a pendant fixture from BoConcept, a Krea bed and crisp millwork by Vania; Photography by Ishita Sitwala

In the living room, the lintel drops lower, framing the garden like a cinematic aperture. It modulates light and proportion, making the greens feel closer.The greens, of Badam and Kachnar, were planned by Sneha to match pace with the architecture. Light, too, is not about creating theatrics, Akshat explains, “Light is about creating a wash. Drama through light works beautifully in hospitality projects, but you don’t want drama in a house. There’s already enough drama in life.”

The plan is fluid and transparent, with spaces opening into one another and maintaining clear sightlines. Sectionally, the house is dynamic: windows and skylights modulate volumes, bringing indirect light deep into the interior. “Height, light and space are the real luxuries here,” he says. What was to be the master suite became his parents’ room, complete with a small temple for his father’s daily prayers. His guitars, meant to occupy the large studio space, were accommodated into a bedroom when the build order shifted — a practical decision that became, over time, a personal alcove. These changes were possible precisely because these decisions were quickly turned around and executed between him and Sneha. “Striving for clarity as a client and a user allowed us to make those changes.” The house is pragmatic, technically intelligent and philosophically clear. It refuses to imitate architectural heroes, but is in constant conversation with them. It treats robustness not as brute strength but as the ability to evolve without demolition. And it reflects an architect unwilling to merely occupy inherited forms of practice.

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