Chuna & TeakInterior Architecture

Apartment

Sea-Facing Reset

A 1990s sea-facing flat with the view walled off by a corridor.

Where
Worli, Mumbai
Carpet area
1,450 sq ft
On site
22 weeks
Finish level
Signature
A sunlit living room with a low sofa facing full-height windows

The brief

Two owners, one working from home full time, wanting the sea in the room rather than glimpsed from a passage.

The hard part

The society has a hard no on touching structural walls, and a lift too small for a three-metre worktop.

What changed

The living room gained nine feet of usable width and west light that reaches the kitchen by four in the afternoon.

The decisions

Three moves did
most of the work

  1. 01

    Removed the corridor, not the wall

    The passage was a partition, not structure. Taking it out gave the living room the full west elevation without a single society objection.

  2. 02

    Worktop in three pieces

    Cut and jointed on site, because the lift is 1.8 metres. The joint sits under the hob, where nobody looks.

  3. 03

    Storage behind the bedhead

    Six hundred millimetres of wardrobe recovered from a bedroom that was only ever going to be for sleeping.

Before and after

The same room,
eight months apart

The same living room before work started, stripped back to floorboards and a boxed-in corridor
BeforeAfter
Drag, or use the arrow keys, to see what was there before.

The rooms

Photographed a year
after handover

Living room with open shelving and layered textiles
01Shelving runs the full wall to keep the floor clear
Seating area with a large artwork above a low console
02One large piece instead of a gallery wall
Living space with a yellow sofa against a concrete wall
03The one saturated thing in the flat

Specified

Every finish, named

The written specification runs to eleven pages. This is the part of it you can see from the door.

  • Lime plasterWalls, hand-applied, two coats#E8E1D6
  • Burnt teakJoinery and window reveals#6B4A2F
  • Raw brassHandles, left to patina#B08D46
  • InkFrames and the kitchen base run#22201D

Something like this,
in your flat?

Send us the floor plan and the two things that annoy you most about the space. We will tell you honestly what it would take.

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