Hotel and Resort
Interior Designers.

Rest is a quiet business. It asks for a room where the air moves without being felt, where the corridor outside does not carry a trolley at midnight, and where the reading light finds the page rather than the ceiling.

None of that is decoration. It belongs to the frame, to the risers, and to the routes cut through them long before a fabric is chosen. Here the same studio draws all of it into a single model, so the ceiling beneath a beam is designed by the people who put the beam there.

Hotels this office fitted out decades ago are still trading, and the families who commissioned them have come back for the next one. That is the only review of an interior worth reading.

A hotel is not one interior. It is many, and they have to live together.

The bridal suite and the staff locker room. A restaurant at eight in the evening, and the same floor the next morning laid out for a conference. Banquet halls that fill in a rush and empty in one. A spa that wants warm still air, a gym that wants it cold and moving, a kitchen that wants neither. Then the rooms nobody photographs — the front office, the accounts desk, the cafeteria the staff eat in — which is where the building is actually run from.

Each wears at its own rate and peaks at its own hour, and all of them draw on the same risers. Bringing them into one building is the work. The finishes board comes last.

Inside a tiger reserve the choice is narrowed before anyone opens a sample box. What can reach the plot, what the forest department will permit to be moved, and what the district’s own masons and carpenters already know how to work — that is the shortlist, and it is a good one.

At Tadoba it produced sandstone from nearby, Tandur stone laid in checkerboard underfoot, terracotta overhead, and teak doors and railings salvaged from wadas that were being taken down anyway. Old timber arrives already the colour it is going to be. The furniture there is handmade rattan.

So the resorts are built in stone, timber and terracotta, and they are better buildings for it. Stone cut nearby arrives sooner and is repaired by trades who already know it. A roof of local tile weathers at the same rate as everything standing around it. Timber stained dark loses itself in the tree line instead of announcing itself across the water.

The same discipline runs through a city hotel, where the constraint is not the forest but the housekeeping trolley, the banquet crowd and fifteen years of continuous trading. A material earns its place here by how it looks on the day it is handed over and by how it looks long after.

Luxury in a hotel is not a richer version of the standard room. It is a different building.

A suite wants a span the guest-room grid was never asked to give. A spa wants warmth, water and silence in the middle of a plan designed to be dry and still. A restaurant with an open kitchen wants a route for the extract that was found at frame stage — or is now climbing the wall outside, in view of the pool.

Which is why the suites and the spa are the first things to thin when interiors arrive after the structure has gone out to tender. Everything generous about them was decided in the frame, and the frame is drawn here.

The practice was founded in Nagpur by Ar. Sukumar Nashine and has stayed with one building type long enough to have opinions about it. His son, Ar. Shashank Nashine, took a master’s in building sciences at the University of Southern California and practised in Los Angeles before returning to lead the design studio. Ar. Sonia Mohabey leads interiors.

What is unusual is not the size of the office but its shape. Architecture, structure, mechanical and electrical, fire fighting, acoustics, landscape and interiors sit in the same rooms and draw into the same model. A question that would ordinarily travel between four consultancies is settled at a table, in an afternoon.

Which is why interiors here are not a service bought in at the end. They are what the building was heading towards from the first sketch.

Furniture, light fittings and equipment are chosen in this office and sampled in it, and the vendors are held to what was chosen. What an owner keeps afterwards is a specification precise enough to replace a single chair in the banquet hall years later, with the same chair.

But a hotel is settled by its mock-up room. One room built complete, stood inside, argued over and then signed, and every room after it follows. It is worth the fortnight it takes, and it is worth having the person who drew it standing in the doorway while the argument happens.