When Aanchal Goel moved back to Delhi from Mumbai in 2023, she was something of a cynic about ever finding a flat that felt like home. Then she walked into a three-bedroom Gurgaon apartment, at eye level among the trees of a verdant neighbourhood, and changed her mind. What drew her to it at first wasn’t just the flat but the housing society it was in. “It reminded me of Bandra, where neighbours smile at each other, conversations casually begin in elevators. It’s the kind of warmth everyone longs for but rarely initiates,” she says.
Sofa fabric from Nomad 97% India. A Crosley turntable sits nearby, and the carpet is from Loops by Latika. Most of the ceramics and paintings here are gifts from Goel's partner whose eye for collectibles runs distinct from her own — among them, a hatching crocodile from Nimmy Mudskippers Studio in Goa, and a Lego bouquet the two built together.
The blinds are delicately embroidered with Warli motifs.
Goel is the founder of Objectry , a furniture label built on clean, geometric forms carrying an undercurrent of whimsy. Her apartment is, in some ways, an extension of this ethos, but for reasons that go beyond her own aesthetic proclivities: in true waste-not-want-not fashion, Goel furnished the apartment in large part with rejects, offcuts and prototypes pulled from the Objectry workshop. “None of them were unusable, just not perfect from a sales standpoint. The dining tabletop had failed quality control, the dining chairs never sold, the bar stools were prone to cracking, the convex mirror in the living room was an unsuccessful first sample. Several timber components had just been made incorrectly.” Goel brought that same tenderness for flawed things into every other corner of the home. Stone ledges, walls and even furniture edges were wilfully softened and shaved into slightly uneven profiles. “It gave the home a tactility that polished spaces rarely achieve,” she says. “As a bonus, it’s also saved my elbows countless collisions.”
A well-stocked bookshelf overlooks the greens.
The paper pendant light above the dining table is from Ikea; nearly everything else in the room is from Objectry.
However, designing the Gurgaon apartment wasn’t a solitary effort, even if the ideas were mostly hers. Goel's mother, who has an instinctive understanding of space, worked out most of the structural changes, including the enlarged kitchen and bathroom. Two young designers, just out of college, Dheeraj Kharagwal and Ishan Kaushal, came on board to resolve the MEP details across the space.
The Red Room with a custom headboard. The meditation gong on the side table is from Svaram in Auroville — "it rings for a minute after it's rung, to help concentrate," Goel says. She adds, “I needed safety grills for my two nephews so rather than treating them as an afterthought, I designed them from scratch and perched little birds on them.” The blinds are from Muslin.
In the Blue Room, a small wall-mounted ceramic sculpture, custom-made for Goel by Riddhi of Koorm Studio adds an element of whimsy.
The terracotta shelf in the Red Room is from Tula Home; the miniatures inside it are from Dastkar.
Where the project proved an education for Goel was in a reexamination of her own creative propensities. She always thought of herself as someone primarily drawn to monochromatic and minimalist aesthetics, and in designing the apartment, she began questioning these self-assigned descriptors. “I don’t think I started with any concrete ideas; they came to me as I went. I ran with some idiosyncrasies as I kept finding them,” Goel says. She began thinking of her three bedrooms by colour rather than function—the Red Room hers, the Green Room for guests, the Blue Room her study—and once a room found its hue, its door took the same one. “During this renovation, I think I was trying to reset what I thought about myself,” she adds.
The desk lamp came from her partner's apartment — "I was convinced it was actually made to be in this room," Goel says. A Roberts International radio sits alongside it. The curtains and blinds are from Muslin.
The bed was designed and built in-house; its lights were made from studio wastage.
The two teak chairs belonged to Goel's parents, restored and redressed in fabric from Safomasi.
Another challenge, Goel says, was oddly familiar, and one she’d faced when starting Objectry: actualising her visions into reality with karigars. “Many of the details in the house didn’t have visual references I could point to,” she says. “We were developing new textures for stone, experimenting with finishes on the doors, and figuring out techniques that sort of fell outside what everyone was used to making. The process involved a lot of prototyping, trial and error, and conversations before the ideas could be executed the way I had imagined them.” Most were hits, with some misses. One such pursuit was that of the flooring. Tiny eight-inch tiles, a different colour for nearly every room, run through the apartment and were painstaking to lay down; Goel insisted the level stay identical across every room, bathrooms included, “because I wanted to walk barefoot through the house without ever stubbing my toes.”
The kitchen takes on a balmy shade of yellow. “Somehow, yellow makes cooking feel optimistic,” she says, mixing the colour with white, brass and teak so it had something to push against. She cut through a wall to open the kitchen onto the living room, choosing to ignore the common belief that open kitchens don’t suit Indian cooking, simply because she was drawn to the idea “of watching someone cook the way you’d watch a TV show from the ’90s”, even though she isn’t much of a cook herself, by her own admission.
The front door's face reworks one of Objectry's rug patterns into a geometric yin and yang, dressed on the inside with antique Sri Lankan hardware.
Goel's impulse to continually reimagine conventional design forms—as is evident in her years of designing furniture—extends, in a rather poetic fashion, to her front door as well. Its creative conception started by first solving a set of practical problems: a smaller door integrated into the main one, sized for her two nephews, and a window to let outside light through during the day. Once the functional side was settled, Goel reached into Objectry’s own vocabulary, borrowing from a rug design the studio had made and reworking it into a more geometric version of yin and yang, a symbol whose sense of living inside contradictions has always appealed to her. “Once the idea arrived, the rest was simply refining the proportions and details,” she says. Because the exterior reads as contemporary, she wanted the interior face to feel warmer, so she dressed it in antique hardware and decorative fittings she picked up in shops in Sri Lanka, giving the two sides of the same door entirely different characters depending on which one you’re standing on.
The red bathroom took up a whole balcony. Goel demolished it to make room because she "loves the idea of a bathroom that is bright, large, holds plants and, most importantly, has a bathtub." A second mirror sits angled diagonally across the ceiling, installed purely to pull in more of the room's abundant sunlight.
There is a seemingly effortless ease suffused through the home: it feels warm and lived-in, but as Goel will tell you, none of it was left to chance, even where it looks unplanned. “Every decision, whether visible or invisible, was made with thought. It may have been thoughtfully ignored, but there was deliberation with really everything that’s gone in,” she says. In the end, she puts it more simply: “While I was editing the apartment, I was editing myself.”
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