This Surat-based designer’s office is unexpectedly cottagecore

Eshita Marwah is an easy guest to entertain. If you invite her to a party, she'll probably spend the evening rearranging your bookshelf or organising your tableware by size and colour. If your lampshade has a single tassel out of place, she’ll sniff it out immediately, and replace them all with something even better—beads that match your wallpaper or a glass bauble in the colour of the curtains. Her mind is relentless—always observing and processing and analysing and fixing. She chases an idea like Alice chases the rabbit, going deeper into a place that wouldn’t make sense to most of us, but where the magic is undeniable.

“I am too focused,” says the interior designer over a Zoom call from her newly refurbished Surat office. “If something catches my eye, I can’t rest until I’ve taken care of it.” That attention to detail is what makes her office, with its arched panels, candy stripes and surprisingly soothing combination of pale blue and red, worth writing home about.

Colourful but calm, bold but not busy, and with a view that looks straight onto the Tapi riverfront, the space has all the elements that Marwah’s design practice, /e has made its signature. Across the 315sq ft room, a singularly bespoke style shines through: the rugs, designed by her, was manufactured by House of Knots, the fabrics were customised by Studio Yuri, the bespoke furniture was made by Studio Conifur, the art on the door panels was hand-painted by Surat-based design studio Rogán, and the customised lighting is by avant-garde Delhi studio Mother Gone Mad. All of these are brands that Marwah works with regularly.   

Marwah's path to interior design wasn’t straightforward. She came from a family of doctors; loved maths but hated biology. A childhood penchant for playing dress up sparked an interest in fashion design (she even earned a spot at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Gandhinagar), but she chose to pursue electronics engineering instead. A Masters from the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialised in semiconductors (and met her architect husband), landed her a stint designing circuits for CERN’s ATLAS detector—the same one that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle in 2012. (“I still get goosebumps when I think about it. I like to think I was part of the discovery.”)

When the couple decided to return to India, Marwah took her chance and started her interior design practice alongside her husband’s architectural one. But even today, whether she’s designing furniture, or tinkering with a detail most of us wouldn’t even notice—her hyper-focused engineer mind takes over. “Whether you’re designing a layout for a circuit or a home, it’s all about balance,” says the designer. “A circuit has to be balanced to work.” Design, in that sense, also “works” in the sense that good design can make you feel differently. Marwah’s design practice is a constant pursuit of that feeling—that feeling of a space being “right”, a space that “works.”

Consider her office, where red candy stripes are offset by a not-quite-blue, not-quite-grey hybrid, perfectly poised between soothing and playful. She selected the tone on pure instinct; she knows exactly what combination of colours she needs to see to feel calm and creative; focused but not belligerent. The chandelier, an experiment in bent metal, is a “quirky, standout” piece that reminds her of someone “dancing the waltz”—a refreshing visual break to turn to on a work-intensive day. Her rug, that she designed with House of Knots during the pandemic, represents the joy and freedom that she longed for at the time. “People who have only seen some photos tend to think this is a home office,” she laughs. “I wanted my office to not feel like a typical office. I wanted it to be a space where I create and let my ideas flow.” Spirited and modern, it leaves the staid office behind for a theatrical glimpse of her creative process.

In just nine years, Marwah has landed high-profile clients that are elusive for even well-established designers. In 2022, Airbnb reached out to her to refurbish former cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s Goa home for a marketing campaign. In fellow designer Anjali Mody of Josmo Studio, she found a kindred spirit when she designed the interiors for her Goa villa. This month, she is collaborating with design studio Nicobar on a brand campaign while developing her own customisable product line of wallpaper, soft furnishings, rugs, and furniture, called The Afternoon Library.

With a resumé so diverse, Marwah is part of the burgeoning trend-agnostic designers in India who celebrate individual expression above everything else. Gone are the days of derivative minimalism and maximalism for maximalism’s sake. Also on the way out is the era of Instagram supremacy, in which spaces were designed solely for the photo op. Today, design is being driven by instinct.

And it is instinct that tells us that a mind like Marwah’s—always working, always seeing—could never be fully satisfied. Naturally, she isn’t done tinkering with her office just yet: up next, she’s designing another rug while adding some artworks. Perhaps the space will always be a work in progress. Her own practice is expanding (she manages a team of six) and I imagine there will always be a rabbit to chase.