Designed Residences

As the Indian real estate market emerges out of its nascent boom, its early appetite for land banking, flashy marketing, zealous inventory building and large footprints, have waned. The focus has literally moved from quantity to quality. Today, with the mid-segment consumers displaying a more reticent mood, the ability to attract and capture an extremely mobile and exacting consumer is the key.

Across various segments, design is fast emerging as a critical market differentiator in driving value and optimising investments. Here are some design trends to keep an eye on, for the new year.

Dual key apartments: The Indian urban family has enthusiastically moved residence from plots to apartments, over the past two decades. However, structurally, they have not completely transitioned from being joint- families to nuclear. Now that owning land and constructing private residences in our cities, is becoming less viable, the financial benefits that accrue from apartments in terms of outlay, fringe service benefits and manageability, are obvious. They, however, do not allow the partial ownership transfer or rentability inherent to erstwhile barsatis or garage annexes. The one-bedroom annexe units, with independent access, are also ideal to accommodate the younger generation of these apartments in Zirakpur is dwellers. Many are young professionals who don't want to necessarily separate from their parents in order to adopt a more independent lifestyle.

Smart homes: Security systems and lighting controls first introduced the smart technology of motion sensors, radio controls and algorithms in our homes, about a decade back. Today, the technology has become cheaper and more versatile. Add to that, the huge progress in touch-screen technology, fuzzy logic and mobile computing, and we have now entered an age, where, literally, your home can not only recognise you but learn to read your gestures and allow you to interact with its intelligence with sound, objects and accessories.

The possibilities are limitless with the expertise on offer, designing, engineering and creating a bespoke arrangement of software and hardware technology combinations. These are solutions that seamlessly and discretely marry with the interior design of your home. The next 'big thing' will be interactive and intelligent kitchens and bathrooms.

Unrendered finishes: While the technology in residences may be sleek, the materiality and surface finishes in residence design, is definitely moving towards the unrendered, unfinished and rugged.

From rough brickwork and factory-style cement flooring, to weathered wood and slate-stone veneers, there are surface-cladding options available that even fake age and character in newly constructed, cookie-cutter residences. It could be due to an aesthetic sympathy to reduced budgets, the need for makeovers or it could just be a mental saturation with the same slick, off-the-shelf, tiled materiality on offer in most new residential properties on offer, but the accent is, definitely, on imperfect homeliness rather than polished stateliness.

New-age gardens: Across the world, as cities become denser, we are definitely seeing a reduction in the size and accessibility of recreational green spaces i.e. gardens and parks. Innovation in horticultural technology has meant that now it is possible to have green walls and vertical gardens. Ranging from potted plants stacked onto a structural framework with a drip-irrigation system, to plants literally growing out of a vertical surface, using a fabric like growth medium instead of soil; our fast disappearing connection to nature in city living may yet be redeemed albeit at a reduced scale.

The use of similar advanced technology allows grasses and other short-rooted plants and trees to grow on rooftops and terraces of high-rise structures. As kitchen gardens disappear for want of space, there is a growing tribe of urban farmers who grow small fruits, vegetables, herbs and condiments, at windows or on balconies. The lack of space in city plots for individual backyards has seen yet another innovation, among row-house dwellers.

Art walls: Nothing can relieve the mass-produced monotony of residential interiors like art. While most of us can't afford the work of celebrated masters, thanks to a fresh crop of extremely-talented muralists, graphic designers and graffiti artists, making their foray from streets into homes, art has now become a lot more accessible. Due to their antecedents as a public contemporary art form, murals tend to be large scale and vibrant and their aesthetic, at times, even radical. Street graffiti tends to be political and irreverent. There is, however, plenty of fertile ground in contemporary interior design for using text, type and pop graphics on walls. While the current vocabulary may be global, this realm of contemporary Indian art is evolving with mercurial speed and constantly referencing and challenging our cultural context here. Source Time Property.

My name is Bharat Bhushan. I love writing on real estate, finance, home design etc.