History of Indian Interior Design: From Havelis to Modern Apartments

Every Indian family that sits down with a designer brings an unspoken history into the room. The wish for a proper entrance where shoes are left outside, the insistence on a separate pooja corner, the preference for a kitchen that can be closed off, the love of a swing, a carved door or a brass lamp — none of these are random tastes. They are habits shaped over thousands of years by climate, joint-family life, ritual and craft. Understanding where they came from makes it much easier to decide which of them still deserve space in a 1,000 sq ft flat, and how to give them that space well.

The history of Indian interior design is usually told as a story of palaces and temples. For homeowners, a more useful story is the story of ordinary houses: the brick courtyard houses of the Indus cities, the courtyard mansions of Rajasthan and Gujarat, the timber nalukettu of Kerala, the colonial bungalow with its verandah, the Art Deco flats of Bombay, the bold experiments of the decades after Independence, and finally the tower apartments that now house most urban families. Each of these types solved the same problems — heat, glare, privacy, family, storage, ritual — with the materials and money of its time.

The common mistake today is to borrow the decoration of the past and forget its logic. A carved arch stuck onto a plywood TV wall, a printed wallpaper of a haveli fresco, a brass bell hung in a flat with no threshold — these copy the surface and miss the point. This article walks through the major chapters of Indian domestic design, explains the working ideas inside each, and turns those ideas into dimensions and decisions that fit a modern apartment.

The long view: six chapters of the Indian home

It helps to see the whole arc before looking at any single house type. The dates below are broad and the chapters overlap — havelis were still being built when the first bungalows went up, and many towns still have both — but the sequence shows how each new way of living added something and took something away.

The Indus cities: planning before decoration

The earliest Indian homes that can be studied in detail are those excavated at Harappan sites such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and, in Gujarat, Dholavira and Lothal. Houses were built of standardised baked or sun-dried brick, many were arranged around an inner courtyard, and many had a bathing area connected to covered street drains. Doors tended to open onto side lanes rather than the main streets. Archaeologists still debate much about how these cities were governed, but the houses themselves show three ideas that never left Indian domestic design: the courtyard as the heart of the house, the separation of private life from the street, and a serious concern with water and cleanliness. Dholavira was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021, and its water-management system is a reminder that Gujarat's design story starts very early.

Vastu and the temple builders: the grid and the compass

Over the following centuries, Indian builders codified their knowledge in architectural treatises — texts such as the Mayamata and the Manasara are the best known — which describe site selection, orientation, proportion and the square grid known as the vastu purusha mandala. Much of this knowledge was developed for temples, but it shaped houses too: rooms placed around a central open square, the kitchen associated with the south-east, water and the entrance favoured in the north and east. Stripped of superstition, the texts encode sound climate sense for much of India — morning sun welcomed, harsh afternoon sun kept off, a central void to pull air through — and they gave Indian craftsmen a shared modular language for proportion. The question of how literally to follow Vastu in a flat is covered separately; historically, its biggest legacy is the habit of planning around a centre and an orientation.

The courtyard house: haveli, pol house, nalukettu and Chettinad mansion

From roughly the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, the dominant prosperous Indian home was the courtyard house. It took different names and shapes across regions, but the organising idea was the same: rooms wrapped around one or more open courts, a deliberately layered entrance, and thick masonry or heavy timber that slowed the movement of heat. The word haveli is used mostly in north and west India for the large urban mansions of merchant families, but the type is far broader than the palaces seen in tourist photographs.

The Rajasthani and Shekhawati haveli

The havelis of Jaisalmer, Jaipur and the Shekhawati towns are the most photographed. They are tall, inward-looking houses of stone or lime-plastered brick, often two to five storeys, built around one or more chowks (courtyards). The outer face is closed and screened with jharokhas — projecting balconies with jaali panels — so that the family could watch the street without being seen. Inside, the outer courtyard served visitors and business, while an inner courtyard belonged to the women and the household. In Shekhawati, walls were covered with painted murals, and in Jaisalmer, the yellow sandstone was carved so finely that whole facades read as lace. Behind the ornament, the plan was strictly practical: deep shade, small sun-facing openings, and a vertical shaft of air through the courtyard.

The Gujarati pol house

Ahmedabad's old city, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage City in 2017, is made of pols — gated neighbourhoods of narrow, deep row houses built largely in timber and brick. The pol house is a lesson in compact planning on a small plot. From the street, a family moved through a clear sequence: the otla, a raised platform at the front used for sitting and meeting neighbours; the khadki, an entrance room; the chowk, a small open courtyard bringing light, air and rainwater into the middle of the house; the parsal, a semi-open hall facing the chowk where much of daily life happened; and then the ordo and rasodu — rooms and kitchen — at the back. Carved timber brackets, columns and doors made the facade the family's identity, and many houses had underground tanks that collected rainwater from the roof through the chowk.

The Kerala nalukettu

In Kerala's heavy rain, the courtyard house took a different form. The nalukettu — literally four blocks — arranges four wings around a central open court called the nadumuttam, under steep tiled roofs on timber frames. Rain falls into the court, wide eaves keep walls dry, and the deep verandahs and timber-slatted openings allow air to move through constantly in a humid climate. Larger households built the ettukettu with two courts. The materials — laterite, timber and clay tile — were local, and the joinery was so refined that traditional carpenters followed a codified building practice of their own. The modern lesson is the roof and the overhang: in rain-heavy climates, keeping water off walls matters more than any finish applied to them.

The Chettinad mansion

In the Chettinad region of Tamil Nadu, merchant families built very large courtyard mansions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using wealth from trade across South-East Asia. These houses mixed local craft with imported materials: Burma teak columns, egg-plaster walls polished to a sheen, and the hand-made Athangudi cement tiles that are still produced in the region. Long axial sequences of courts and halls lead from the public front to the private rear. For designers, Chettinad is the clearest historic proof that Indian homes have always blended local and imported materials — the question was never purity, but whether the mix suited the climate and the craft.

Why traditional rooms stayed cool

It is easy to romanticise old houses, and many were dark, damp or cramped. But their best rooms were genuinely comfortable without electricity, and the reasons are physics rather than nostalgia. Four things worked together. First, mass: walls of stone, brick or rammed earth often 450 millimetres thick or more absorbed the day's heat slowly and released it at night, flattening the indoor temperature curve. Second, height: rooms of 3.6 to 4.5 metres let warm air rise above the occupied zone, and high-level vents let it escape. Third, the courtyard: in the morning, cool night air pooled in the shaded court; as the day heated up, warm air rose out of it and drew air through the surrounding rooms. Fourth, the threshold and the screen: verandahs, jharokhas, jaalis and chhajjas (projecting sunshades) stopped direct sun from reaching the walls and glass in the first place.

A modern apartment reverses almost every one of these conditions. Floor-to-floor heights in residential towers are commonly around 3.0 to 3.2 metres, leaving roughly 2.75 to 2.9 metres of clear height — and the National Building Code of India 2016 sets 2.75 metres as the minimum for habitable rooms. Walls are often 115 to 230 millimetres of brick or block, or concrete shear walls, with large aluminium-framed windows. There is no courtyard and rarely a verandah deep enough to shade anything. The result is a room that heats up quickly in the afternoon, which the household then cools with air-conditioning. Interior design cannot rebuild a courtyard, but it can avoid making things worse — for instance by not dropping a false ceiling so low that the room loses its last 300 millimetres of headroom, and by shading west-facing glass outside rather than inside.

The colonial bungalow, the chawl and the Art Deco flat

From the nineteenth century, a new house type spread through the cantonments and civil lines of British India: the bungalow. The word itself comes from the Bengali bangla, a hut type of the Bengal region. The colonial bungalow was a detached single-storey house on a generous plot, raised on a plinth, with very high rooms, a deep wraparound verandah and a large roof. It introduced, or popularised, the separate drawing room, the dining room with a table, and the idea of rooms assigned to single functions — a sharp change from the flexible, multi-use rooms of the courtyard house, where the same space might be used for sitting, eating and sleeping at different hours of the day.

At the other end of the scale, the mill towns — above all Bombay — produced the chawl: long blocks of one- or two-room units opening onto a shared gallery or corridor, with common toilets. Chawls were cramped, but the shared gallery became a social street in the air, used for festivals, children's play and conversation. In the early twentieth century, Bombay also built a remarkable collection of Art Deco apartment buildings, especially along Marine Drive and around the Oval Maidan. These were among the first Indian homes designed as flats for middle-class families: curved balconies, terrazzo and mosaic floors, built-in cupboards, geometric grilles and stepped profiles. The Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018.

For today's homeowner, this period left two lasting habits. One is the formal living room, which many Indian families still furnish for guests rather than for themselves. The other is the cast-in-place floor — terrazzo, mosaic, red-oxide and later Kota stone — which survived for decades because it was cheap, repairable and cool underfoot. Both are worth questioning: the first wastes space in a compact flat, while the second is quietly returning as a deliberate design choice.

Indian modernism: 1950s to 1980s

After Independence, India deliberately chose a modern architecture to express a new nation. The most famous symbol is Chandigarh, planned in the 1950s by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and a team of Indian architects. The Capitol Complex was inscribed in 2016 as part of UNESCO's listing of Le Corbusier's architectural work. Inside Chandigarh's buildings, Pierre Jeanneret's simple teak-and-cane chairs and tables — designed for offices and residences in the city — have since become collectors' pieces around the world, and they remain an excellent model of Indian modern furniture: local timber, woven cane for airflow, honest joints, no unnecessary decoration.

Ahmedabad became a second centre of Indian modernism. Le Corbusier built the Mill Owners' Association building and private villas there; Louis Kahn designed the Indian Institute of Management campus in brick; and Indian architects such as B. V. Doshi and Charles Correa developed an architecture that combined modern construction with Indian climate and craft. Doshi received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2018, the first Indian architect to do so. In Kerala, Laurie Baker built low-cost brick houses with jaali walls, filler-slab roofs and exposed brick that needed no plaster. The common thread was a rejection of borrowed ornament in favour of light, shade, air, local materials and honest structure — which is exactly the brief that good contemporary Indian interiors still try to meet.

Inside ordinary middle-class homes of the same era, interiors were simpler. A typical home had painted plaster walls, a terrazzo, mosaic or Kota stone floor, steel almirahs, a sofa set, a dining table, a wall-mounted showcase, a ceiling fan in every room and a kitchen with a cooking platform of stone or tiles. Carpenters built furniture on site from solid timber and, later, plywood. These homes were sparse by today's standards, but they were durable, easy to clean and well ventilated — and their floors frequently outlasted the buildings around them.

1991 to today: the apartment and the modular interior

The economic reforms of 1991 changed Indian homes as dramatically as Independence changed public buildings. Over the following decades, urban families moved in large numbers from bungalows, row houses and old-city homes into apartment towers. Imported and then locally manufactured materials arrived together: laminates, MDF, gypsum board, vitrified tiles, granite and later quartz counters, aluminium and uPVC windows, modular kitchen hardware with soft-close hinges and tandem drawers. Television and later the internet made international interiors familiar, and the professional interior designer became a normal part of buying a flat.

These changes brought real gains: better kitchens, better bathrooms, built-in storage, reliable hardware, faster construction and a far wider choice of finishes. They also brought losses. The threshold shrank to a door opening directly into the living room. The courtyard vanished, and with it the house's natural light-and-air core. Rooms became sealed boxes cooled by split air-conditioners. And for a while, design became a catalogue exercise: the same false ceiling, the same TV wall, the same glossy laminate, repeated in thousands of flats from Surat to Bengaluru. The most interesting Indian interiors of the last decade are, in large part, a reaction to that sameness.

Heritage elements that work in a modern flat

The point of studying history is not to build a haveli inside a tower. It is to keep the ideas that still solve problems and to drop the ones that do not. In Aaditya Interior's experience, six traditional elements consistently earn their place in apartment interiors when they are designed with modern dimensions rather than copied as decoration: the threshold, the niche, the screen, the swing, the low seat, and the honest local floor. The figure below shows how several of them can come together on a single foyer and living wall in a typical 2BHK or 3BHK.

The threshold is the most important of these. Traditional homes never let a visitor walk straight into family space; there was always a buffer — an otla, a khadki, a verandah, a deodi (entrance passage). In a flat, even a small foyer of 1200 × 1200 millimetres, marked by a change in flooring, a screen or a ceiling detail, restores that layer. The niche — an arched or rectangular recess in a wall — was the traditional home's display cabinet and lamp-holder; a shallow niche of 150–250 millimetres depth does the same job in a modern wall without a bulky showcase. The swing, or hindola, has been part of Gujarati and Rajasthani homes for generations and remains one of the most requested items in Surat projects; in a flat it needs a properly engineered ceiling anchor into the RCC slab and roughly 1800–2400 millimetres of swing clearance. The low seat, inherited from the otla and the gaddi, becomes a built-in bench at 420–450 millimetres height. And the honest floor — terrazzo, Kota stone, handmade tiles — brings back a texture that vitrified tiles cannot fake.

How Indian interior design is changing now — and what comes next

The current chapter is still being written, but several directions are clear from the projects Indian studios are delivering. First, a return to climate-led design: designers are paying attention again to orientation, external shading, cross-ventilation and ceiling height, partly because of rising temperatures and electricity bills, and partly because programmes such as the Bureau of Energy Efficiency's Eco-Niwas Samhita (the energy conservation code for residential buildings) have put the building envelope back into the conversation. Second, a revival of Indian craft as a contemporary language rather than a period style: handloom upholstery, cane and rattan, Athangudi and terrazzo floors, block-printed textiles, brass and bell-metal used sparingly. Third, flexible rooms: the work-from-home years made the multi-use room — the old courtyard-house idea of a space whose function changes through the day — newly relevant.

Looking further ahead, two pressures will shape the next generation of Indian apartment interiors. One is density: as cities grow, flats are unlikely to get much larger, so the premium will be on planning, storage and light rather than square footage. The other is durability and repair: households are increasingly sceptical of interiors that need to be ripped out every ten years, and are asking for materials that age well — solid timber edges, stone, lime, metal — and for modular systems that can be repaired rather than replaced. In many ways that is a return to the values of the pol house and the nalukettu: build with intent, maintain constantly, and let the house outlive its first owners.

Seven rules for bringing history into a modern home

• Borrow the logic before the look: a threshold, a light-and-air core and shaded glass do more than any carved panel.
• Give the entrance a layer — even a 1200 × 1200 mm foyer with a bench and a screen restores the old otla and khadki sequence.
• Protect ceiling height: limit false ceilings to the perimeter and keep the centre of the main room at full height.
• Use one or two authentic heritage pieces — a real carved door, a hand-made tile floor, a brass lamp — instead of many imitations.
• Choose materials that age well and can be repaired: solid timber edges, stone, lime and metal outlast glossy surface finishes.
• Shade west and south-west glass outside the window where the society allows it; inside, use screens and lined curtains.
• Plan flexible rooms: a parsal-like family zone that can host meals, work, prayer and guests at different hours of the day.

Frequently asked questions

What is the traditional Indian style of interior design called?

There is no single name, because India's traditions are regional. Designers often use broad labels such as traditional Indian, Rajasthani, Chettinad, Kerala or Gujarati style, and Indian contemporary for a modern interior that uses Indian materials and crafts. Each of these is a family of ideas — courtyards, jaalis, carved timber, local tiles, brass and textiles — rather than a fixed rulebook.

What is a haveli?

A haveli is a traditional townhouse or mansion, found mainly in north and west India, typically built around one or more courtyards with a closed, ornamented street facade, jharokha balconies and jaali screens. Many were homes of merchant families. Well-known examples survive in Jaisalmer, Jaipur, the Shekhawati towns, Old Delhi and Ahmedabad.

How can a modern flat look Indian without looking old-fashioned?

Use Indian ideas and materials in a modern way: a clean jaali partition instead of a carved one, a single arched niche, cane or rattan furniture with simple frames, handloom upholstery, a terrazzo or tile foyer floor and warm lighting. Keep the background calm — plain walls, simple joinery — and let one or two Indian pieces carry the character.

Why were old Indian houses cooler than modern flats?

They combined thick masonry walls that slowed heat gain, high ceilings that let hot air rise away from people, courtyards that drove air movement, and verandahs, chhajjas and jaalis that kept sun off walls and openings. Modern flats have thinner walls, lower ceilings, large unshaded windows and no courtyard, so they heat up faster and rely on air-conditioning.

Is it possible to have a courtyard in an apartment?

Not a true open-to-sky courtyard in most towers, but the idea can be approximated: keep the centre of the flat open and uncluttered, use glass or jaali partitions so daylight reaches the core, place a planted balcony or a double-height zone (in duplexes) where the plan allows, and allow cross-ventilation between opposite windows by keeping internal doors and screens open-able.