Dreamcatcher

Sachin Verma

• Architects

An urban apartment that discards the glossy and celebrates the true. a home built on the principle of honesty of materials. dreamcatcher is the home of a design entrepreneur who moves fluidly between Delhi, Mumbai, and Milan — a citizen of the world whose life demands a home as adaptable and alive as her work. Drawing from the idea of the mobile citizen, the apartment was fundamentally rethought: not as a collection of rooms, but as a responsive, contemporary interior where the living room becomes the true core of domestic life.

The living room is not a room. It is life itself. A bedroom wall was demolished, and the apartment opened into something it had never been before — a vast, breathing living volume. Italian marble was rejected. Plaster and false ceilings were stripped away. The governing principle was simple, and absolute: honesty of materials. Show what things are made of. Keep what is real. What remained was celebrated - raw brick, exposed structure, industrial concrete floors extending uninterrupted from interior to balcony, binding the entire home into one continuous spatial canvas. Here, materials do not decorate. They testify. Nothing hidden, nothing pretending. a home that feels collected not decorated.

photo_credit Sachin Verma — Sachin Verma

The entrance unfolds as a sequence of deliberate gestures. A matte black door, accented with a red dot handle, commands attention before you have even crossed the threshold. The house number appears not as plate or plaque, but as light and shadow the first sign that this home communicates differently.

Just inside, a niche holds textile fragments and terracotta objects: a quiet nod to an education rooted in textiles and materials, and to the design principle that runs through every room beyond. On the left wall, Picasso’s dachshund Lump, rendered as a sketch keeps watch, a gentle echo of Max, the F1-champion-named dachshund who has claimed the apartment as his own.

Jute curtains draw you inward. Then a half-swing barn door in red arrests the movement, revealing only a glimpse of the living volume beyond, withholding the full reveal just long enough to build anticipation. The arrival is choreographed. The house asks you to slow down before it opens up. You are welcomed by a metal mesh sofa - transparent, structural, basic. Beside it, Chandigarh Kangaroo chairs and B&B Italia’s iconic UP armchair, designed as a metaphor for a woman’s womb, tethered to its spherical ottoman like a ball and chain. A homage to Italy, to the design capital of the world, also where a castello has been transformed into a design campus by the resident. A cantilevered thinlong dining table is anchored by a column on one side and metal suspenders on the other, grounded beneath a deliberately messy chandelier of Edison bulbs.

Another honest material moment. The magis Spun Chair, inspired by a spinning top anchors the bar side. Easy chairs and a swing for contemplation complete what is, in reality, a room who’s furniture has more personality and character, all held somehow in one space.

The Living room literally has a large variety of seating furniture that lend a unique experience, complementing the restlessness of the owner, who loves different experiences. The restlessness is intentional. This is the home of someone who moves constantly – between cities, between cultures, between ways of working. The living room holds all of that. It is a room designed for the full spectrum of a modern, mobile life: work, contemplation, conversation, celebration. The bar is elementary and thin planks are inserted into a shortened wall, held above by industrial pendant lamps suspended from the raw ceiling. It is stripped of pretension. Behind the bar, is an entire wall is given over to a tagboard— a living journal, a visual record of what is on the resident’s mind at any given moment. The home is, among other things, a canvas. And the tagboard is its most honest admission of that fact.

From the dining zone, a long bookshelf extends the wall, anchored by a 75-inch Smart TV that doubles as a computer monitor for video calls across geographies. The cantilevered study table extends from it another straight forward plank. The home is also an office. A swing hangs nearby — for the moments between work and thought, when neither discipline nor leisure quite fits, and what is needed is simply the gentle rhythm of being still while in motion. Throughout the apartments, prints and serigraphs by leading Indian and international artists are hung deliberately at the resident’s eye level - a conscious act of human scaling. The art does not announce itself from above. It meets you where you are. Old school switches, vintage lamps, antique telephones and kettles are placed not as nostalgic decoration but as art objects in their own right — relics of a time when things were made to be seen as well as used. Undyed raw jute in its natural form extends the material honesty to furnishing. Hyacinth stools. Hyacinth dustbins.

A dialogue between a person enchanted by objects that defined and defied history and a life conducted at full pace in the present. A life in search of the Indian contemporary. The indirect north-facing balcony extends the concrete floor of the interior without interruption, inside and out. A picnic table sits here, waiting for Delhi winters. Greens are still arriving. The orientation keeps the whole apartment cooler through the summer months, Two bedrooms sit at the periphery of this life - deliberately simple, deliberately functional. The first holds a four-poster bed: a memory of a small rural town in India, of mosquito nets in hot summer months, of a childhood in which this kind of bed was simply what beds were. The middle room is a study of a different kind - a long, slick plank at the right height, Herman Miller chairs, a space that asks for a different quality of attention than the living room offers. The kitchen and second bedroom remain largely untouched spaces that serve without demanding to be noticed. In this home such restraint is a design decision.