THREE GENERATIONS, ONE OBSESSION

Since 1959, Daisaria Architects has built across Mumbai’s luxury residential market. Its current generation, led by brothers Devansh Daisaria and Karan Daisaria, discuss why luxury means breathing easier, and building without shouting about it.

Photos by : Daisaria Architects

EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH DEVANSH DAISARIA AND KARAN DAISARIA

Q: Daisaria is now in its third generation, with you both leading the practice. What has evolved in the firm's design language since your grandfather founded it in 1959, and what have you consciously preserved?

We often joke that if our grandfather walked into our studio today, he'd probably understand only half the software on our screens, but he'd completely understand why we're doing what we're doing.

We've become far more experimental. We use technology, computational design, sustainability, data — all the buzzwords people love throwing around. But honestly, those are just tools.

What we've consciously protected is something much simpler. We still believe relationships outlast buildings. We still believe our word matters. We still believe architecture is a service before it's an art.

People remember beautiful buildings. Clients remember how you made them feel while building them. That's one lesson we had no intention of changing.

Q: Your portfolio spans multi-family residences, luxury villas, and mixed-use towers. Is there a recent project that best encapsulates the Daisaria aesthetic, and why?

We'd probably say Sejal City. Not because it's our biggest project. And definitely not because it's the tallest. Because every time somebody told us, “You can't do that,” it became another design challenge.

Every ambitious project begins with a series of impossible questions. Sejal City was ours. Designing a development of that scale as a young design studio is exciting, intimidating and, at the same time, full of aspirations.

How do you make high density feel peaceful? How do you give someone living on the 35th floor the same joy someone gets in a bungalow? How do you make people stop saying, “It's just another tower”?

That's the project where our philosophy came together. The planning, the skyline, the podium, the shared spaces, the light, the wind — everything had to work together.

The podium became an extension of the landscape rather than an isolated amenity deck. Shared spaces were designed to encourage spontaneous interaction while still offering quiet corners for retreat. The skyline wasn't treated as an object — it became part of the city's larger composition.

Sejal City reminded us that architecture is never just about buildings. It is about behaviour, memory, emotion and belonging. A well-designed home doesn't simply occupy a site — it shapes the lives unfolding within it.

We often say good architecture succeeds in two moments. The first is immediate: it makes you stop, look up and say, “Wow.” The second happens over time, when the people who live there continue to discover comfort, delight and meaning in the spaces around them. That second moment is the one that matters most.

If Sejal City taught us anything, it's that architecture isn't defined by height or scale. It's defined by the life it makes possible.

Q: Mumbai's luxury residential market is dense and highly constrained. How do you create a sense of space, serenity, and scale within those limitations? Does your approach differ when designing a holiday villa compared with a primary city residence?

Mumbai teaches architects one very important lesson: you don't have the luxury of wasting anything. Not land. Not sunlight. Not wind. Not a single square foot.

People often think luxury means making rooms bigger.

We think luxury is making people breathe easier. Sometimes moving a window by three feet changes an entire room.

Sometimes a double-height space isn't necessary, but a perfectly framed view is.

Sometimes reducing visual clutter gives you more luxury than adding another imported stone.

A holiday villa is like taking a deep breath, but a city home is where you recover from not being able to breathe all day. That's a very different emotional brief. One celebrates escape and the other quietly protects you from the chaos outside.

In a holiday villa, we actually want the house to slow you down. You wake up with the sunrise because the bedroom is oriented towards it. The shower might open into a private courtyard. The dining table spills outdoors because nobody is in a hurry. Corridors become gardens, and every window is trying to frame nature rather than block it out. Time moves differently there, and the architecture should respect that.

A Mumbai apartment has a completely different job. You've probably spent two hours in traffic, another ten in meetings, and your phone hasn't stopped ringing. Your home has to lower your blood pressure within five minutes of walking in.

So we think about very different things. Where do you drop your keys without creating clutter? Can the kitchen stay connected to the family without looking like a workspace? Can your favourite chair catch the soft evening light? Can your bedroom be silent even if there's traffic outside? Can the balcony become a place you'll actually use instead of just watering plants?

The funny part is, both are called luxury homes.

But one is designed for your best days.

The other is designed to rescue your hardest ones.

Q: Is there a material, craft tradition, or regional design influence you're particularly excited to incorporate into Daisaria's upcoming projects — something Luxe Code readers might not expect from a Mumbai-based practice?

We actually think India has become strangely obsessed with importing inspiration.

Sometimes we know the name of an Italian marble quarry better than we know the craftsmen working a few hours from Mumbai.

That's backwards. We're excited about bringing Indian craftsmanship back into contemporary architecture, but not as nostalgia.

Stone that ages beautifully. Terracotta that performs. Metalwork that tells a story.

Local artisans working alongside computational fabrication. We don't see tradition and technology fighting each other. We think they're waiting to become teammates.

That's where the exciting work is going to happen — at least in our studio — in the near future.

Q: How do you define luxury in design today, and where do you see Daisaria heading in its next chapter?

Luxury has become very noisy, because everyone seems to be selling “luxury.”

Everyone is pitching imported finishes, branded kitchens and expensive materials. But we've met people living in ₹100-crore homes who still don't have privacy.

They don't get morning sunlight. They don't hear birds. They don't have a place to sit quietly with a cup of coffee.

So... are they actually living luxuriously?

To us, luxury is walking into your home and instantly feeling your shoulders relax. It's daylight that changes through the day. It's windows you actually want to open. It's the architectural iconism of the building that is strong, yet not on your face.

As for Daisaria, we're not chasing the title of being the biggest architectural firm. We're chasing something much more difficult.

We want someone to walk into a building we've designed, without seeing our logo anywhere, and say, “This feels like a Daisaria building.” If we can create that feeling consistently, we'll know we've built something much bigger than a portfolio.