In a monochromatic villa by Ameet Mirpuri, an experimental flooring sets the tone for a house dipped in quiet sophistication.

It’s the kind of suggestion that Ameet Mirpuri, founder of his eponymous studio, acknowledges he doesn’t find many takers for – not many homeowners are ready to take a chance on leather-finished Italian marble as flooring. But for the residents of this 5,500 sq ft home in Hyderabad, the recommendation landed without reluctance or debate. “The client fell in love with the suggestion the minute she saw the material,” recalls the designer. Agreeing to leather-finished marble underfoot was a crossover from safe choices to more experimental ones, certainly. But perhaps what tipped the scales in its favour was also the fact that the selection fell in so seamlessly with the homeowners’ brief – a clean, monochromatic space.

This leather-finished Italian marble set the tone for an unabashedly grey palette. “That rawness in the grandeur of Italian marble is how the theme took hold throughout the whole house.” For Ameet, the home dovetails with his firm’s “very bold, very experimental, very eclectic” philosophy. The journey, though, was routed through the specifications for a Vastu-compliant, light-coloured home for four, with Ameet delicately nudging those set boundaries with clever choices. Working with an already-existing structure in a villa community, the designer leveraged it to create free-flowing spaces, starting with a significant architectural addition right at the entrance – a central atrium “for a double-height ceiling”. Leaning further into the idea of optimising available space, he also created a sunken living room. “It’s two steps down, so we gained another foot in ceiling height, making the living area look grander.” Even a seemingly awkward location for a ground-floor home office was deftly handled with slide-away partitions. “They act as a design feature in the entire living area and a way to open up the space,” Ameet notes.

Within the reworked interiors, the moody, predominantly grey palette stitches the design together. Its use in unusual, unexpected ways is what elevates the space, enriching it with layers and meaning. “From the ground floor to the top floor entertainment area, the scheme is the same, but the materials and textures differ,” Ameet shares. Between the living and dining area, for instance, the fluted, leather-finished marble clads an oddly-situated marble pillar, making it a point of interest. The same material also finds use in the powder bathrooms. “We wanted to add more texture, which is how we ended up using the fluted marble in different areas of the house. That’s how we pulled together the space,” he explains. Walls and ceilings, too, are finished in a gentle limewash grey. And the wooden flooring in some areas of the house also has touches of grey, an interesting loop back to the shade that defines the home.

While grey retains its thematic dominance, the clients eventually agreed to add a little colour – if it came through artworks. That’s when the slow curation began, an undertaking that lasted two years after completing the interiors. “The homeowners wanted to pick pieces slowly so this collection has grown over time,” says Ameet. Art and well-chosen antiques add measured doses of vibrancy: from diverse and striking pieces like works by Manjunath Kamath and Valay Shende, to eye-catching Chinese vases, a quirky Japanese doll collection, and artefacts from Fort Kochi. Taken together, they create a narrative of colour and character that expands and enhances the home’s original vocabulary, revealing an artistic soul within its clean lines and grey spaces.