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After decades abroad, what does coming home actually mean?
For the couple behind this 5,000 sq ft Kochi apartment, it meant being closer to both sets of parents as they grew older, and able to care for them. It meant reconnecting with their roots. And it meant building, over time, a collection of heritage furniture and artwork that could one day be inherited by their family — or travel back with them to their home in the United States.
The result is a four-bedroom apartment that feels like an ancestral home, and works like the most modern house they have ever lived in.
The design integrates ethnic Kerala furniture with luxurious classic European style, and gives neither the upper hand. Colonial-inspired rooms unfold with intricate vintage detail in every corner, while the furniture was customised with fine detailing that gives the home its quiet opulence.
This is the kind of home that shows what Indian luxury can be. The craft is Kerala's. The standard is the world's.
The rooms were curated with antique and vintage pieces chosen for their craftsmanship and their stories, alongside new furniture made in Temple Town's workshop to sit with them. The goal was a home with character that could not have been bought off a shelf, and a collection that would grow more valuable to the family every year it is lived with.
The living room coffee table is the best example. Its top is an antique door salvaged from a Kerala home. Its legs, designed and made in our workshop, take their form from traditional Kerala massage beds. An object from one old Kerala house and a form from another, rebuilt into something a modern family uses every day.
A central objective of the project was to use as many reclaimed elements as possible, and to choose materials that reduce harm to the environment and to the people living in the home.
Sustainability here is not a label. It is the same idea as the heirloom: make things well once, and keep them.
After so many years abroad, the family relied on far more home automation than most homes in India. Every room needed to be fitted with it — without a single wire, switch point or device visible.
That was the trickiest challenge of the project: carrying the heritage character of the home consistently through every room while fitting in every appliance, gadget and technology the family was used to. It was solved with strategic panelling. Every modern comfort is there, quietly tucked away, and the rooms still read as an old family home.
A home that will be shared with ageing parents has to be calm. The heritage detailing gives the apartment its warmth; the concealed technology gives it ease; and the restraint in how the rooms are furnished gives it peace. It is luxurious without ever being demanding.
Temple Town's clients are, for the most part, C-suite leaders of billion-dollar companies and business owners who have truly made it — many of them, like this family, having built their success across continents. They have lived with the best the world offers. What they look for in a home is something rarer: design they can recognise as genuinely fine, and a culture they can recognise as their own.
This is a home for a family that crossed the world and came back — and for the parents they came back for. Its antiques will be inherited. Its new pieces will become antiques. And in the meantime, it is simply a comfortable, beautiful place to be together.
This Kochi residence was designed and furnished by Temple Town, the interior design studio and furniture maker founded by Meera Pyarelal in Thrissur, Kerala, in 1999, working in the Heirloom Modernism idiom.
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