Organic urban apartment

Cavernous, curving interiors filled with built-in niches and furniture are more often associated with houses sculpted from cob and other natural building materials than with apartments in suburbia. But design firm The White Room has managed to recreate that sculptural, organic feel in a Mumbai-area apartment with lots of amorphous surfaces.

Sculptural feel in the city

Apartment interiors like a cob house

The result is a bright, airy interior that’s almost entirely white with a few pops of color in the form of wood furniture, a stunning natural dining surface built into the wall and custom tile in a pale blue-green. The ceiling is high and rounded, and nearly all of the doorways are arched.

Arched doorways

Rounded shower walls

It’s a fusion of traditional earth-based building aesthetics and modern design, all within a suburban setting. The curves extend all the way to the closets and a creatively tiled bathroom reminiscent of the inside of a sea shell.

Metallic shower tile

Organic white bedroom

“This studio apartment is designed for a young couple and is a composition of twin long vaults,” say the architects. “One housing the living space and the other the master suite. These spaces are connected to each other through smaller vaults and arched openings carving out spaces for kitchen, wardrobe and bathrooms. The spaces flow seamlessly into each other, creating an integrated whole and giving the feel of a sculpted greek cavern.”

“The White room studio is built on the basic principles of exploring the bare beauty of materials. Here the focus has always been on exploring innovative ways of approaching fundamental problems of space, proportion, light and materials. The way in which a wall meets a floor, or how a door fits into a wall, flush or proud, are not mere details, they are as much architecture as the planning of a sequence of rooms in a gallery, or the composition of a facade. We consider architecture, of all the arts, as the one that most depends for its expressive power on rubbing up against the gritty constraints of every day life.”