Project 01
Casa Terra
A sea-facing apartment stripped back to its structure and rebuilt around a single continuous horizon of travertine and teak.
- Location
- Mumbai, Maharashtra
- Year
- 2025
- Type
- Private residence
- Area
- 4,200 sq ft
FormaStudio
01 — The studio
We create considered interiors where architecture, materials and everyday life exist in balance.
Forma Studio works across residential, commercial, hospitality and retail interiors from studios in Mumbai and Bengaluru. We are as involved in where a wall goes as in what covers it.
Every project begins with a plan and a light study, not a mood board. Materials are chosen for how they behave over a decade — lime, stone, unlacquered metal, oiled timber — and detailed so that use improves them.
We keep the practice deliberately small so that the people who draw a project are the people who stand on its site. Forty-two completed interiors across eleven cities since 2018.
02 — Featured
Selected work, one room at a time.
Three projects that show the range of the practice — a sea-facing apartment, our own studio, and a haveli repaired into a hotel.
Project 03
Forma Office
Our own working home: a single open floor of board-formed concrete, blackened steel and one very long table.
- Location
- Bengaluru, Karnataka
- Year
- 2025
- Type
- Studio headquarters
- Area
- 12,400 sq ft
Project 05
The Ivory Rooms
A 1930s haveli converted into twenty-two rooms, where every original surface that could be kept was kept.
- Location
- Udaipur, Rajasthan
- Year
- 2024
- Type
- Boutique hotel, 22 keys
- Area
- 21,000 sq ft
03 — Index
Project archive
04 — Material / Light / Texture
The board before the drawing.
Nothing enters the studio library without a maintenance note: what it does under water, under heat, under a fingernail, and what it looks like in five years.
Stone
Travertine, Kota, granite, sandstone
Cut thick, honed dead matte, joints left honest.
Wood
Teak, oak, ballau, reclaimed stock
Solid wherever it is touched, veneered wherever it is only seen.
Metal
Brass, bronze, blackened steel
Left unlacquered so that handling becomes part of the finish.
Fabric
Linen, cotton, raw silk, wool
Undyed or naturally dyed, in five weights across a single room.
Glass
Cast, fluted, reeded, low-iron
Used to divide without darkening, and to carry light deeper into plan.
Concrete
Board-formed, lime render, plaster
The background material — flat, quiet, and never sealed to a shine.
05 — Philosophy
Less, but better considered.
Restraint is not an aesthetic here, it is a method. Fewer moves, each one resolved, each one carrying more than one job. Five ideas hold the practice together — open any of them.
Before anything is chosen, the plan is argued over. Most problems that look like decoration problems are plan problems that were never solved.
We map daylight across a full year before placing a single fitting. Artificial light is designed to finish what the sun leaves undone, not to replace it.
We prefer materials that record time — lime, stone, unlacquered metal, oiled timber. A surface that improves with handling is worth more than one that resists it.
Height, depth and the distance between things are set on a single dimensional system, so that a room feels resolved even when nothing in it announces itself.
A beautiful room that is difficult to live in has failed. Storage, service, acoustics and maintenance are designed first and hidden last.
06 — Services
What we take on
We work at the level of the plan before the level of the surface: walls moved, openings resized, ceilings opened, services rerouted. This is the part of the work that determines whether a space will ever feel right, and it is where we spend the most time.
- Spatial planning
- Structural coordination
- Daylight and openings
- Services strategy
Family homes, city apartments and weekend houses, taken from first plan to final styling. We design storage before we design furniture, and we test every layout against an ordinary weekday rather than a photograph.
- Full interior design
- Bespoke joinery
- Furniture and lighting
- Art and styling
Studios, offices and workshops where the brief is measured in noise levels, air, light and adjacency. We plan for the quiet work as carefully as for the collaborative work, which is usually the part that gets forgotten.
- Workplace strategy
- Acoustic design
- Fit-out documentation
- Furniture procurement
Guest experience designed as a sequence — arrival, threshold, seat, service, exit. We work closely with operators on covers, service lines and back-of-house, because a hospitality interior that fights its operation never survives its first year.
- Guest journey
- FF&E design
- Operational planning
- Lighting and mood
Older buildings carry decisions worth inheriting. We survey carefully, repair rather than replace where we can, and make new work legible as new — set slightly apart from the old rather than blended into it.
- Condition survey
- Adaptive reuse
- Heritage-sensitive repair
- Phased construction
For clients who would rather not manage twelve trades, we take the project end to end: design, procurement, execution, styling and handover under a single agreement with a single schedule and a single accountable team.
- Design and documentation
- Procurement
- Execution management
- Handover and care
07 — Process
From idea to space
Five stages, roughly nine to thirty months. The first has no drawings in it at all.
01
Listen
Understanding lifestyle, needs and context.
We spend the first weeks in the existing space and in conversation — how the day actually runs, what is kept, what is endured. No drawings are produced in this stage.
- Brief document
- Site and light survey
- Budget framework
02
Explore
Concepts, references, materials and spatial possibilities.
Two or three genuinely different spatial strategies are developed far enough to be compared, each with its own material direction and cost implication.
- Concept options
- Material direction
- Indicative plans
03
Shape
Plans, elevations, details and design development.
The chosen direction is resolved to construction level — every joint, junction, reveal and service run drawn rather than left to site.
- Working drawings
- Joinery details
- Lighting and services layout
04
Build
Coordination, execution and craftsmanship.
We tender, appoint and then stay on site. Fortnightly reviews, mock-ups for anything unusual, and a single point of coordination between every trade.
- Tender and appointment
- Site reviews
- Mock-ups and samples
05
Reveal
Final space and finishing details.
Styling, snagging and a maintenance handover written for the specific materials used, so the space ages the way it was designed to.
- Styling and install
- Snag close-out
- Care and maintenance guide
08 — Studio
Inside the practice
Forma Studio is a design practice focused on creating timeless and thoughtful interiors.
We were founded in 2018 around a straightforward conviction: that the quality of a space is decided long before anyone chooses a fabric. Our work runs from private houses to hotels, and in every case begins with the plan, the light and the way a day actually moves through a room.
Studio
Fourteen people across Mumbai and Bengaluru — designers, technologists and one full-time model maker.
Approach
Plan first, surface last. We resolve the spatial problem before anything is selected, specified or styled.
Craft
We work with a standing group of makers — joiners, masons, weavers, metalworkers — many of them for the full eight years.
Collaboration
Clients are in the room for the difficult decisions rather than presented with a resolved answer at the end.
09 — Index
2018
Studio founded
42
Projects delivered
11
Cities
08
Years
Demo figures — sample content
10 — People
Fourteen people, two studios
The people who draw a project are the people who stand on its site. Four of them here.
Aarav Mehta
Founder, Principal Designer — since 2018
Trained as an architect, spent six years on site before opening the studio. Draws every joinery detail in the practice by hand at least once before it is modelled.
Ishita Rao
Design Director — since 2019
Leads the residential portfolio. Responsible for the studio’s material library, and for the rule that no sample enters it without a maintenance note attached.
Kabir Nair
Associate, Hospitality — since 2021
Came from restaurant operations before design, which is why our hospitality plans tend to survive contact with a real service.
Meera Iyer
Senior Designer, Detailing — since 2020
Runs technical documentation and site coordination. Keeps the studio’s standing library of 340 tested junction details.
11 — Journal
Notes on material, light and practice
Architecture12 June 20266 min
Designing for Indian daylight
Most interior lighting advice is written for latitudes that never get this much sun. Here, the discipline is subtraction — and the tools are depth, texture and shade.
12 — Image index
Fragments
Details, thresholds, stairs and light — the parts of a project that rarely make the cover.
In their words
“Forma transformed our home into something we never imagined possible.”
Sample content — fictional client quotes
13 — Start a project
Start a project with Forma StudioHave a spacein mind?
Let’s create it.