EDITOR’S LETTER

HM BITT RSW T

HM

Every time someone opens the doors of their home to us, I’ve begun to realize, it’s a bit terrifying for them—an emotional leap of faith. During the making of this issue, I’ve felt keenly aware of this internal struggle people go through when they have to publish their bedrooms and verandas and kitchens.

Loulou, the delightful Isla Maria Van Damme, called and said, “It’s my fi rst and my most favourite project.” Maithili Ahluwalia’s home. On the phone, I could hear the rain in the back, as she called from Chennai to say, “I’m fl ying down for the shoot,” with a tremble in her voice. “It’s very dear to my heart,” she repeated.

Mansi Poddar held her breath at the slightest suggestion that we leave the terrace out of the feature. I was arguing for visual purity and she very simply said, “But the terrace is important to me.”

And Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, who began with “just my o ce, please”, soon enough found the courage and generosity within her heart to open the doors to her fabulous London home and studio. She spoke so tenderly and breathlessly of her art and design, all in a fi rst-person voice—“My Swaminathan, my Manjit Bawa, my Jeanneret”—that to me it sounded very much like, ‘My love, my darling, mi amor….’

A home is nothing less than a love a air.

As editors, we often forget that. We think of it as a story, a layout. We’re looking at it from a point of view of proportions and symmetry. We’re trying to achieve diversity—a content-mix, if you will. We get greedy for credits: What antiques can I call out in the captions? I am personally obsessed with headlines, waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a song that works as a title. But for a homeowner, it’s their home—actual and lived and imagined. Space is a physicality, but also an emotion, the innermost recesses of someone’s memory. I’m reminded of a book I read in graduate school, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Apart from being utterly dense, it opened my world to the magic of attics and doorknobs and childhood homes, and the emotional response that buildings can evoke.

The hope is that you’ll turn these pages with that thought in mind. While there’s the annual AD100 to pour over, and you’ll notice that our radar moves along the lines of style and fashion in this issue—an Hermès collaboration with Bijoy Jain, Bandana Tewari’s sustainability outliers, and my personal favourite, drawings of that timelessly sexy Chanel No. 5—but mostly, I invite you to look at these as private, personal homes; photo albums of people’s lives, however choreographed; their dreams made real; fragments of their chaos and their harmony; pieces of the love that they give and the love they receive. It’s more fun that way! KOMAL SHARMA

PHOTO: SARANG GUPTA.