Inside a Mumbai apartment by SHROFFLEóN where one meeting and infinite creative freedom gave rise to a 3,400 sq ft dreamscape

The call came from Hong Kong. The clients – well travelled, assured, with homes across multiple cities – wanted their Mumbai apartment designed by SHROFFLEóN and handed back to them fully complete. There would be no extended back-and-forth, no iterative reviews, no site visits. A single phone conversation would set the course; after that, the architects would be left to their own devices. In fact, the first time Kayzad Shroff and María León would meet the homeowners in person would be on the day the project was finished.

“We were kind of working in the dark,” says Kayzad. The clients’ trust was as expansive as their brief was concise: a luxuriously warm, neutral home that could serve as a backdrop to their collection of artworks and artefacts. Beyond a programme-led request to rework the original three-bedroom layout – sacrificing portions of the living area and master bedroom to carve out a den – the aesthetic decisions were left entirely to the architects.