Arpita Subbaiah, Founder and CEO of IMARAA Designs, on why the most important thing a designer can do — before touching a material, a floor plan, or a finish — is stop talking and start listening.
Most conversations about bespoke interior design in Bangalore begin with aesthetics — the mood board, the material palette, the references a client arrives with after weeks on Instagram. Arpita Subbaiah, Founder and CEO of IMARAA Designs, tends to begin somewhere else entirely.
Before a single finish is discussed, before a floor plan is opened, she listens. Not to the brief — every client has a brief — but to the life behind it. The way a household actually moves through its day. Which rooms carry the most traffic and which sit quietly underused. What gets placed on the kitchen counter every morning without thinking. The objects that accumulate near a favourite chair.
It is, she acknowledges, a slower way to start. It is also, she maintains, the only way to arrive at something genuinely bespoke. “Bespoke is not a finish or a price point,” she says. “It is the degree to which a space reflects the people who live in it. You cannot get there by looking at a mood board. You get there by understanding a life.”
Bespoke is not a finish or a price point. It is the degree to which a space reflects the people who live in it.
WHAT LISTENING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
IMARAA’s design process is structured around what Arpita calls the narrative phase — a period of deliberate, unhurried conversation before any creative work begins. The questions she asks are not design questions. They are life questions. How does this family eat together? Where does the day begin and where does it end? What does the home need to hold that it does not hold now?
The answers, accumulated over multiple conversations, become the brief that actually matters. The aesthetic decisions that follow are not imposed — they are derived. A client who needs quiet in the morning gets a bedroom that earns it through material choices and spatial orientation, not just soft furnishings. A family that gathers in the kitchen gets a kitchen designed for gathering, not for photography.
This approach shapes what bespoke interior design in Bangalore looks like at its best — not the application of a premium aesthetic to a given space, but the creation of a space so specific to its occupants that it could not reasonably exist anywhere else. That degree of specificity, Arpita argues, is the actual measure of luxury.
A home is only truly finished when every element within it has been considered — including the objects that live on the shelves, the pieces arranged on a table, the way a collection of ceramics sits together in a room.
THE DETAIL THAT COMPLETES A SPACE
At IMARAA, the design process does not end when the civil work is done and the furniture is placed. It ends considerably later — when the space has been styled to the level of finish that Arpita considers complete. That level is specific and, to clients encountering it for the first time, occasionally surprising.
A home, in her view, is not finished until its objects have been considered with the same rigour as its architecture. The ceramics on a shelf are not decorative afterthoughts — they are part of the argument the room is making. The way a dining table is dressed, the objects that sit together on a sideboard, the particular arrangement of pieces near a window: these details are what separate a designed space from a styled one, and a styled one from a space that has been genuinely finished.
“Styling is not decoration applied at the end,” she says. “It is the final sentence of a long piece of writing. You can have a beautifully constructed piece that ends badly. We don’t hand over until the sentence is complete.” For clients seeking bespoke interior design in Bangalore at a level where the attention to detail holds all the way to the last object in the room, it is a commitment that is both unusual and, in the end, exactly what bespoke means.
CRAFT, SOURCING, AND THE INDIAN DESIGN TRADITION
The listening philosophy extends to how IMARAA sources. Arpita has spent years building relationships with artisans and craft communities across India — weavers, ceramicists, metalworkers, stone-carvers — whose work carries a depth of making that standard procurement channels do not offer. The objects and materials that result from these relationships are not interchangeable. They are specific, in the way that bespoke things are specific.
This approach to sourcing is, in part, a reflection of Arpita’s broader conviction that the most considered spaces are ones where every element has been chosen rather than selected. There is a difference, she suggests, between a material that was available and a material that was right. The process of finding the latter takes longer. The result is a room that holds its quality across years rather than seasons.
For Bangalore’s luxury homeowners — a generation of clients who have built high standards into every other area of their professional lives — this degree of consideration is increasingly what they arrive at IMARAA looking for. The bespoke interior design market in Bangalore has matured. The clients within it have too.
Arpita Subbaiah has been doing this work long enough to know that the rooms she is most proud of are rarely the ones that photograph best. They are the ones where, six months after handover, the client mentions almost in passing that the house has started to feel like theirs. That is, she would say, the point at which the listening paid off. Everything else followed from that.
ABOUT IMARAA
IMARAA is a full-service interior design studio based in Domlur, Bengaluru, specialising in bespoke interior design in Bangalore and across South India. The practice delivers luxury residential interiors, turnkey design and build, custom furniture, smart home integration, and sustainable material specification. All projects are backed by a 10-year craftsmanship warranty. Sustainable Design. Conscious Luxury. Inspired Living.
www.imaraadesigns.com · contact@imaraadesigns.com · +91 99005 56580
