Luxury real estate is changing and beginning to ask a more interesting question: At what point does a home stop feeling like a home? And can the efficiency of a five-star hotel coexist with the intimacy, idiosyncrasies and messiness of domestic life? Only a few developers understand this shift as intimately as Oberoi Realty, so we sit down with Gayatri Oberoi, the Design Curator at Oberoi Realty, to understand how they are responding to this new way of luxury living. A former model and actress known for her role in the movie ‘Swades’, she now works at the intersection of luxury, architecture and design.
While her husband, real-estate developer Vikas Oberoi, has shaped some of Mumbai’s most ambitious residential developments, Gayatri brings a more intimate, design-led perspective to the spaces she inhabits and shapes. She works closely with designers and teams on the interiors of show apartments, malls and hospitality-led spaces, bringing a discerning eye and an instinct for how people actually want to live.
In this conversation, Gayatri reflects on how design, hospitality and real estate are becoming increasingly interconnected and what happens when the best ideas from hospitality find their way into homes.
Design Pataki: We’re in your beautiful home in Juhu in Mumbai. Can you tell me a little bit about how you dreamt about this project and the brief you had in your mind when you started?
Gayatri Oberoi: We were fortunate enough to have this beautiful piece of land right on the beach, and to make a dream home here was something Vikas and I were talking about since we got married. I must give credit to Vikas for this because he had a very clear vision of how he wanted this house to be. The higher you go, the better we will feel living there. Like, if you say, “No, no, let’s just make like two stories then it’s going to you’re going to get the noise, you’re going to get the smell, you’re going to get everything. He’s very particular about his ceiling heights. We kind of optimised everything that we could, and that is how he started planning it in terms of functionality. We wanted several places to entertain; we wanted a formal living, we wanted a lounge, we wanted a large space where we can have larger gatherings. We all love food and wine, so he was very clear about the sections: this is where I want the Molteni kitchen, and invite all the chefs from different parts of the world and have these beautiful wine dinners. He was very keen on having beautiful charity dinners where we can auction or call philanthropists from all over the world, so we’ve actually done that over the last couple of years.
DP: Going back to the architect and designer Piero Lissoni. What drew you to him to design your beautiful home?
GO: He had a very clear picture of the planning. We really like clean lines in terms of design. We like spaces that just have a lot of light and air and, of course, have that element of design and are eclectic, but at the same time we don’t like too much clutter. We had been fortunate
enough to experience a few places that Piero had designed. We love the conservatorium in Amsterdam; then there was another hotel in Venice that he had designed, and I had also seen some pictures in a magazine of him designing a penthouse in New York. Somehow, when we saw that, we just felt we should approach this person because clearly he has a great sense of architecture with his iconic staircases, and because our house is vertical today, the staircases of our house are like sculptures in itself. We loved the finesse that he added to his designs.
DP: Any challenges Piero Lissoni faced, or you faced when you were designing this home or one great memory you had while designing this home?
GO: A challenge for him, I would say, is more like fitting into everything culturally. As a client, we could very well give a design, and then he can say why this will not work: A) culturally, B) environmentally, or even execution. So there was a lot of back and forth on that, which they embraced, and I love the fact that he respected that. At the end, this is your home, and you are going to live in this house.
From our end, the challenge is that you’re always running against time. You always want to just finish it yesterday and move in. Now that the house is ready, this is us; this is what we are and what our taste and lifestyle are like. We are not trying to keep up with trends; we just want to own this home as our own space. I think the house is more about what we have liked to see visually through our travels, what we have picked, what has stayed with us. In fact, the house got ready, and then the art came because I need to feel the space; I need to feel what I want to get.
DP: I read that you believe a home should function like a hotel. Could you elaborate on this?
GO: When it comes to a home, it’s very much about services. Like, where is the service part going to be, and where are the guests or family going to enter? Keeping that in mind, he planned the house in a way where we have an entire vertical, which is the back end of the house. Let’s say, tomorrow when you have a party, it should feel like you enter a hotel where you don’t see all the services that are going on in the hotel. You don’t see the chaos at the back right, so that’s exactly how he wanted the house and that’s why in terms of planning, we have a very clear section in the entire house which is at the back of the house, where the service elevators are and the entry/exit; all that is planned.
When he meant boutique hotel, he meant in terms of staffing. For example, he said that in a hotel, you don’t have like 200 staff staying there. People work in shifts; they come, and they go. This is the way the systems are placed, so why can’t we do that at home? We’ll have three or four in-house staff, who are used to your living. People are going to work in shifts, and you’re going to have 24-hour service, and they’re going to come and go, and you’re not going to know it, so like I said initially, when he said boutique hotel again, it sounds so impersonal, but I kind of got it when it came to the functioning, and now, touch wood, it’s seamless.
DP: I believe one of your Oberoi Realty projects has the Ritz-Carlton servicing, so could we talk a bit more about that?
GO: We love hospitality and are looking forward to the Ritz-Carlton opening in 2027. Vikas got this plot of land, The Three Sixty West (also known as Oberoi 360 West), and it was a very high-end luxury project; it’s not about just making a building. He was very keen on the standards that are maintained; from entering the lobby, you’re met with the right person. You have a concierge for the people living there, and Ritz-Carlton staff who are servicing them on a day-to-day basis. He also put up a restaurant there, so that when you don’t really have to entertain at home, you can just take people down to this restaurant where the staff does a great job with the food. It is a very seamless home-to-hospitality experience, and I must say the people are really enjoying that. They are loving the standards and services, and because it is associated with a brand like Ritz Carlton and it’s never going to drop. They have their SOP’s so well in place when it comes to service, safety, and guest experience that it has been very smooth.
DP: Post-Covid, luxury homebuyers increasingly expect hospitality-led services and sports amenities. How do you see this influencing residential design?
GO: We do see a shift post covid where I feel people want large spaces, and luckily The Three Sixty West came in at the right time. I would say in 2010 or something when we started, people would be like, “Really? You want to make apartments that are five and six thousand square feet? Who’s going to buy them? These are too large.” And now we have one family who will buy three because they feel one is too small; I need a bigger space. So the good part is that they are actually able to have this villas-in-the-sky experience, and people are loving large spaces.
I think we have a lot of small and big independent designers who are doing so many wonderful projects. We always had the skill and the artisans; we only did not know how to give them a direction. We work a lot with international designers, but then I tell them that this is really good in our country, so let’s do this here, and let me get the samples done for you by these people, and they get so excited because, honestly, they also love the fact that they can create something so unique.
DP: You started as an actress. How has your journey towards design been, and what have been your memories from the last few years which have really taken you deeper into design and art?
GO: I think being in front of the camera, being an artist and an actor, the creative quotient was always there. I was always very interested in design, so that’s why I had a small stint at FIT. I had done product design as I always wanted, like a fallback option in my career. After I got married, of course I wanted to shift focus on family, so that kind of slowed things down for a while. But like I said, when you have that creative bone in you, it just comes out, so it was a very easy transition for me.
What I currently do is I look at the complete execution of the interiors of our projects, so it could be lobbies, it could be show apartments, a bit of malls and hotels essentially. Right now, my new pet project is the Ritz-Carlton, which I’m so excited about finishing. It started slowly, but I have to say, now that my kids are grown up and I have the time to go deeper and deeper into the projects. And I have learned a lot from the site experiences.
DP: What’s next in terms of design projects?
GO: I have to say the most exciting project coming up is the Ritz-Carlton, which I think will be a great offering to the city in itself because we are always short of great hotels. Piero Lissoni is designing this as well, and it’s in the 360 West. There are two towers; one is at the back, which is residential, and then there’s one in the front, which is commercial. From the ground to the 28th floor is going to be the hotel, and then 29th onwards there are apartments. Each apartment is 1,500 square meters, again serviced by the Ritz-Carlton. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say, but he has the Aman also signed up, so hopefully Mumbai will have an Aman soon.
DP: Which is your favourite hotel that you’ve stayed in?
GO: We as a family always go back to Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Antibes in the South of France. It’s a beautiful classic jewel on the French Riviera, which is a timeless destination. Since the 1930s, there have been all these people going there, and they just celebrated a hundred years, if I’m not mistaken. I love it for its timelessness, I love it for the location, and for the memories we have spent there. Besides this, my favourite hotels are, I have to say, I love the Aman in New York and The Alpine Gstaad in Gstaad.
