When it comes to home decor, restraint is often associated with neutral colours, minimal accents, and an overall lack of clutter. However, Shivani Gupta Mittal, the Founder and Principal Designer of House of Lalittya, thinks otherwise. For her, the true meaning of the word ‘restraint’ lies not in the aesthetic, but in the story behind how a piece is created. A huge advocate of buying vintage decor, she also thinks that a room with ‘nothing older than the people in it’ feels insubstantial. But here’s where her point of view gets a little more interesting: Mittal says nothing is timeless in decor! To dive a little deeper into these unconventional, thought-provoking decor ideas, read on…
Manifest: What inspired the inception of House of Lalittya, and what gap did you hope to fill in the home décor space?
Shivani Gupta Mittal: I started House of Lalittya in March 2018 on my own, out of a 100 square foot office. Ayush joined me about six months in and now leads architecture as Principal Architect. I had trained abroad and come back to a market that was doing something strange: building beautiful houses that belonged to nobody. You could walk into four homes in the same neighbourhood and not be able to tell who lived in any of them. The gap was really two gaps. The first was between design and delivery. A lot of studios hand over a drawing and disappear, and then the client spends eighteen months chasing a contractor who has never read a section drawing in his life. We wanted to own the whole chain, so we built the studio as design-to-build from day one. The second gap was furniture. We kept designing pieces we could not find anyone to make properly. That is how the furniture arm began with my mother, Shalu Gupta, who started her own business at fifty-two and still personally inspects every single piece that leaves our Dhankot factory. Nothing goes out that she has not put her hands on.
M: How would you define the design language of House of Lalittya?
SGM: Loud, private and fun. I say it in that order deliberately. Loud, because we are not scared of colour, scale or ornament. We come from a country that has never done restraint and I do not see why we should start pretending otherwise. Private, because a house should reveal itself slowly and should feel like it belongs to the family living in it, not to the internet. A home is not content. Fun, because there is almost always one thing in our projects that makes people laugh — a colour where you did not expect one, a door that opens the wrong way on purpose, a piece of furniture that is far too dramatic for the corner it sits in. If a project of ours is finished and nobody in the family has a favourite thing to show off, we have failed.
M: Today's homes are becoming increasingly personal. How do you create pieces that are timeless yet reflective of individual personalities?
SGM: Honestly, I would push back gently on the word timeless. Nothing is. Beige is not timeless, it is just easy to forget. What actually survives in a home is not neutrality—it is attachment. People keep things they love and things that are well made, and they throw out everything else, no matter how safe it looked when they bought it. So we work on those two things. Craft, because a piece that is jointed properly and finished by hand will still be standing in forty years. And personality, because that is what makes someone bother to keep it. We spend a lot of the first few meetings just asking questions that have nothing to do with design. How do you eat? Who visits without calling? What did your grandmother's house smell like? Pinterest is banned in my client meetings, and that is not a gimmick—the moment someone opens it, we stop designing their home and start copying somebody else's.
M: What role does storytelling play in the collections you create?
SGM: It comes first, not last. Our Jadau collection began with the idea of the jeweller's workbench—stone set into metal, held rather than glued, the way jadau setting actually works. Once that idea existed, the pieces almost drew themselves. The names came from the same place: Takht-o-Masnad for a sofa that sits on a stone platform like a low throne, Aari for a two-seater carrying hand embroidery, Mehr for a bed with a fluted marble fan at its head. But I have one rule about this. If you need to read a paragraph to understand why a chair is beautiful, the chair is not doing its job. The story should be the reason the piece exists, not an apology for it.
M: How do you integrate traditional techniques into contemporary home décor?
SGM: By refusing to put a traditional technique on a traditional object. Aari embroidery on a wall hanging is a museum piece. Aari embroidery on the back of a low modern sofa is something a thirty-four year old will actually buy and live with, and that is what keeps the karigar who made it employed next year. We work directly with our craftspeople rather than through layers of contractors, which means the maker is in the room while the piece is being designed, telling us what the material will and will not do. Inlay, brass casting, hand embroidery, stone fluting—these are not decorative add-ons for us, they are structural to how the piece is conceived. The revival is real, but it only lasts if the work is commercially alive. Craft does not survive on nostalgia. It survives on orders.
M: What are some of the biggest shifts you've observed in how Indians are approaching home styling today?
SGM: Three big ones. People are commissioning again instead of only buying off the shelf — they want the thing made for their wall, in their dimension. Second, they would rather have one exceptional piece and an empty corner than fill a room with things they are lukewarm about. That is a real maturity shift and it has happened fast. Third, imported no longer automatically means better. Clients now ask where a piece was made and who made it, and they are proud when the answer is Indian. The shift I am less happy about is the algorithm home. Everyone is seeing the same forty images, so everyone is asking for the same arch, the same fluting, the same off-white. Homes are starting to rhyme with each other. That is the thing we spend most of our energy arguing our clients out of. And post-2020, homes simply work harder. One room is now an office, a guest room and a place a toddler destroys every evening. That is a design problem and it is a more interesting one than it sounds.
M: Is there a material, texture, or finish you're particularly drawn to at the moment, and why?
SGM: Brass that is allowed to age. Not lacquered, not sealed, not protected from its own life. Brass that darkens where hands touch it and stays bright where they do not, so that after five years the object carries a record of how the family used it. It is the least fussy material I know and the most alive. Alongside it, semi-precious stone—lapis, malachite, onyx—set into metal rather than laid flat as a surface. The whole Jadau collection came out of that pairing. Stone reads as cold in photographs and is anything but in person; the colour moves depending on where you stand. And fluted marble, which we have been using on headboards. Something about the light on those ridges at seven in the morning.
M: Luxury today is often associated with restraint rather than excess. Do you agree?
SGM: Half agree. I am with the argument against excess for its own sake—the chandelier bought because it cost a lot, the wall of imported marble that means nothing to anybody in the house. That is not richness, that is a receipt. But restraint has quietly become its own kind of costume. An empty white room is not automatically disciplined; quite often it is just undecided. Taking things away is only impressive when you know exactly why each one left. What I think actually signals value is time and hand. How many hours went into it, whose hands did it, can it be repaired in twenty years. A deeply ornamented piece made by one person over three months is more restrained, in the sense that matters, than a bare room full of things ordered in an afternoon.
M: Sustainability has become an important conversation in design. How is House of Lalittya incorporating conscious practices into its products and processes?
SGM: I want to answer this honestly rather than impressively. We are not a zero-waste company and I would not claim to be one. What we do control: we own our factory at Dhankot, which means our waste is visible to us rather than hidden inside a vendor's invoice, and offcuts get used in smaller pieces rather than binned. We build in solid wood where the piece needs to last, instead of veneer over board that cannot survive a single repair. We source and manufacture locally, so the freight footprint of most of our work is a few hundred kilometres, not a few thousand. And we design for repair—joints that can be opened, upholstery that can be replaced, finishes that can be redone. That last one is the real lever. The most environmentally serious thing a furniture business can do is make something so good that nobody replaces it in five years. Everything else is a rounding error next to that.
M: Which global design trends do you think are worth embracing, and which ones do you believe are better left behind?
SGM: Worth keeping: the return of colour, and of pattern with it. Visible handwork, where you can see that a person made it and it is not perfectly identical on both sides. The unfitted kitchen, which looks like furniture instead of a laboratory. Layered lighting instead of a ceiling full of downlights. And buying old things—vintage, inherited, secondhand—mixed in with new. A room with nothing older than the people in it always feels thin. Better left behind: everything grey. The single accent wall. An open plan applied without asking whether this particular family actually wants to hear the kitchen from the sofa. Oversized sectionals wedged into rooms that cannot hold them. Over-automation, where guests need a tutorial to switch on a lamp. And most of all, the pace of it—the internet naming a new aesthetic every few weeks and everyone redoing their living room to match it. Build a house for the people in it. It will still look right long after the names have changed.