MANSI PODDAR

WRITER KANIKA PARAB PHOTOGRAPHER ASHISH SAHI

Ashiesh Shah Atelier’s Moonshadow vase rests below Arjun Rathi’s Wavelength light. The leather upholstered armchair is from Mahendra Doshi, the bar chairs are from Blue Loft. The apartment’s mosaic floors remain unchanged.

PHOTO: TALIB CHITALWALA. HAIR & MAKE-UP: LEKHA SHAH. Poddar in her living room—the curved couch is by Ashiesh Shah, the coffee table and armchair are from Mahendra Doshi, and the artwork is by Lubna Chowdhary. A jute dhurrie from Casegoods’ Fold collection adds colour and texture.

White bed linens from Bandit Queen adhere to the bedroom’s minimalist regime. The photograph on the wall is by Rishabh Badoni. Facing page, top: A row of stilettos wait to be asked to the dance floor in this chattai-lined walk-in closet created behind the bed. Facing page, bottom: An Art Deco table by Mahendra Doshi and equestrian lamp from Phillips Antiques decorate one end of this sunlit dressing area.

cupants because It curved its foyer to appear softer, more welcoming; it urged the terrace lemon trees to produce more fruit; it prepared its high ceilings to accommodate new feelings. And, in turn, its residents became kinder as well, singing to their plants each morning, making promises to keep the home’s original bones intact, mixing an endless batch of margaritas for guests with no curfew.

This is how entrepreneur Mansi Poddar and her Art Deco apartment in Churchgate have grown to sustain each other since December 2020, a relationship gilded with brass and lined with grass—a shiny, ticklish current that lingers in the apartment, that makes its guests glow.

Poddar styled her two-bedroom terrace home with help from designer Isla Maria Van Damme— whom a lucky few know as Loulou (also featured in this issue, on pg 128). Both were grateful for the solid shell they had to work with. “The apartment was in great shape when we got it. We retained its 10 chandeliers, round brass switches, beautiful bathrooms and mosaic flooring that we used as a cue for the home’s colour palette—green, maroon, mustard,” says Poddar, co-founder at Brown Paper Bag and the Coup Card. She is yet to pass a full four seasons in this home, but the months already spent here are a tableau of winter parties outside, summer lounging inside and monsoon days in the room that will have them.

Let’s begin our tour in the chattai-lined terrace, coloured by the sun and singing with plants—so many that it’s hard to spot the hosts sometimes. Its views of flaming gulmohar trees, a club’s tennis courts, hotels’ neon signs and the Rajabai Clock Tower make the space transition from Tangier garden to Mumbai terrace. A four-poster daybed and mooda stools are there for those who want to sit, but most winter nights here have been spent dancing, while watching a projector cast ’90s music videos on the sliver of bare wall that hasn’t been colonized by bougainvilleas (yet).

In the summer, living and loving and lolling moves indoors more often than not. An obsidianblack line of paint runs across the ceiling and doors, forming a bold frame to contain the living room’s soft curves, the bedroom’s reverential hush. In the living room, a massive round wall mirror— “Loulou’s idea”—is the hero piece, a reflective moon influencing the apartment’s times and tides. Above, bulbs arrange themselves in a single wave; in the middle, a scarlet Lubna Chowdhary work hovers steady on its axis; and below, an undulating couch and coffee table borrow postures from ringed planets. This room packs all the heat and grace of the solar system and it’s hard not to marvel at it.

Follow the black line into the bedroom, where the design becomes more chaste, offering just a bed shrouded in creamy white sheets and tall Colinclean glass doors keeping the terrace at bay. This aesthetic is emblematic of Poddar’s minimalist DNA; it extends to the walk-in closet at the back too, which is (probably) this bedroom’s best-kept secret. It’s also where Poddar tricks the metropolis into thinking that it can be calm under the right regime. Picture a long, calm white room the length of a train coach, where a single brass rack holds up her clothes, each cloaked in a white, linen garment bag. Underneath, shoes line up above a cloud-like runner, waiting to be asked to the dance floor.

Come with a corsage and dance to the other side of the apartment where its second resident, Karan Rai, thrives. The den keeps safe from the rain, tender relics from this businessman’s past: an Art Deco coffee table; an armada of art; a neon sign that, we’re told, used to belong to Abdully’s Folly, an erstwhile speakeasy in Bombay. This room so far has been conducive to TV-watching and reading marathons, work-from-home predicaments, and early Friday cocktails that have been blamed on the rain.

And while the monsoon beats down ruthlessly on an apartment in a building whose name translates to mercy or blessing, this home and its residents take solace in the fact that everything will be washed and new, that every season spent here so far has been more binge-worthy than the last. Winter is coming, and as you’ve learned in this Mumbai terrace story, that’s not a bad thing.