i, &, our fable

Kuber Shah

• Interior Architects

Design Highlights
- Every element — from the carved entry door to the hand-painted murals — weaves into a layered narrative that reflects the family’s history, creativity, and imagination.
- Bold patterns, prints, and colours are orchestrated with intent. The home balances exuberance with natural light and thoughtful layering, ensuring richness never descends into clutter.
- With the wife’s own ceramic lights, curated figurines, and artistic sensibilities shaping the design, the home is deeply personal — part architecture, part autobiography.

Concept
In the midst of the ever-restless streets of Juhu, Mumbai, where calm often feels like a luxury, stands a home that speaks a language all its own. Not the restrained language of minimalism, but one of exuberance: colour, print, texture, detail and story. Designed by Shimona Bhansali, i, &, our fable lives up to its name, a personal epic told in layers.
This is maximalism with meaning. It is bold, unapologetic, but most importantly, deeply personal. For the four-member family who live here — a couple and their two daughters — the home is not just a place to dwell, but a vivid reflection of their inner worlds. The wife, herself an artist, brought an intuitive eye for visual rhythm, layering and emotion into the process. Shimona amplified that spirit, weaving together a design that is not merely decorative, but narrative.

The reference to Marc Chagall’s I and the Village is more than aesthetic; it is spiritual. Like Chagall’s dreamlike canvas, this home unfolds in layers of memory, imagination and symbolism. Walking through it is not a linear journey but a meandering one, you wander, pause, glance, and return, discovering something new each time.
It begins with a door: hand-carved, heavy, studded with figurines from the client’s own collection. More than an entry, it is an artifact, a prologue. Inside, the living room opens to a flood of sunlight through floor-to-ceiling windows. A brocade-inspired sofa, pieced together from multiple fabrics, commands attention, while a hand-painted mural of mountains unfurls behind it like a distant dream. A traditional swing, a plush rug, and an extended balcony breathe light and air into the otherwise exuberant setting.
The dining space is an artwork in itself: a pink marble tabletop set on cast-iron legs, inlaid with brass constellations, resting on a micro-concrete floor alive with whimsical inlays. Even utility-heavy areas like the kitchen are anything but plain with moulded shutters, a story-filled backsplash, stained-glass doors, and geometric flooring ensure that even cooking feels magical.

Elsewhere, the home’s layers deepen into fantasy. The AV and art room serves as a sanctuary, with jungle murals, a vintage canopy bed draped in fabrics, and a chandelier shaped like palm fronds, it feels like an escape into another world. The master suite is regal yet eccentric, with layered prints, a hand-drawn family portrait set in a woodland, and bedside light fixtures sculpted by the client herself. Its red walk-in closet and city-facing bath with stone steps leading to a jacuzzi blur the line between theatre and intimacy.
The guest room toys with circus-like motifs, while the children’s bedroom unfolds like a storybook: baby blue walls, Murphy beds, hand-painted details, striped ceilings, and whimsical touches that nod to both English countryside charm and Indian storytelling traditions.

Every room, every corner, continues the fable. What might first feel overwhelming slowly reveals itself as intentional, like a Sabyasachi creation or a Chagall painting, lush, layered, and unapologetically ornate. This is not maximalism for its own sake. It is storytelling through space, where each object is a memory, each texture a decision, and each corner a chapter.
i, &, our fable is not a template. It is a singular home, designed for a singular family. It expresses their lives richly, vividly, and with emotional intelligence. And in doing so, it invites anyone who enters to find their own story within its walls.