What makes a home feel lived-in? For Chintan Punjabi of Studio Autumn, the answer begins with materials that grow richer with time. Wood deepens naturally, stone embraces its imperfections, and fabrics soften into the rhythms of everyday life.
“These materials settle into a home,” he says, “almost the way people do.” The design team built this 3,300-square-foot Bangalore house entirely around this conviction.

Studio Autumn

Amber Warmth

Something that did not veer into either the austere or the ornate. “Farmhouse cottage style was the framework that tied it all together,” opines Chintan.Its design language brings together restraint, lived-in texture, and longevity. Each quality complements the others without overpowering the overall composition. Together, they create a balanced and enduring character. Deep wood, earthy browns, and burnished gold saturate the home, making its name almost effortless. The rich palette inspired the designers to call it Amber. The word fits the way a well-chosen material fits: exactly, and without argument.

Chintan’s first act was to establish a sensibility coherent enough to run through every room. Laid-back living, pieces that age well—these were the coordinates that governed every custom furniture decision in the house. The design team uses arches to soften major transitions across the ground floor. They use these architectural punctuations to distinguish the communal zones without creating hard separations. This approach keeps the spaces visually connected while giving each area its own identity. Beading details run across every ground-floor door, painted white and dressed with brass accents that complement the dark wood throughout.

Curated Nostalgia

The lighting balances contemporary clarity with nostalgic character. Vintage-inspired pendants pair with distinctly modern wall sconces to create a layered atmosphere. Green enters the palette as the single accent colour amid an otherwise neutral canvas, hushed enough to belong and specific enough to surprise. The design team treats the gallery walls like an intimate private collection. Botanical prints and dreamy landscapes bring a sense of nature indoors. Together, they reinforce the home’s connection to the natural world. 

The living room is the home’s moodiest room: dark teak in the coffee table, rafters overhead, a corner pendant light that casts diffused pools. A custom TV unit has been designed to function as a vignette, with a painting above absorbing the wire into the overall arrangement. Along the staircase wall, a colour block keeps pace with the ascent; below, storage tucks itself into the underside with utmost discretion. 

Kitchen Character

Character abounds in the kitchen. In a sleight of hand that transforms a constraint into a character note, an existing beam has been clad in wood to read as a rough-hewn log. Sage green cabinetry, a wood-toned island, vintage pendant lights, and a backsplash and flooring that mirror each other in a boota pattern: the room is coherent without being coordinated.

Adjacent, a common wash area introduces a flamboyant dado—the one moment in the ground floor where the home permits itself unabashed exuberance.

The first floor holds the private rooms, each calibrated to its inhabitant.

Personal Touches

The master bedroom opens with a small ledge and a painting: a prelude, as Chintan describes it, forging a private threshold within the larger home. Inside, the wardrobe shutters are faced with custom block-printed fabric, its running motif scaled precisely to the shutter size.

The bed and dresser are both finished in black-stained wood; a vintage side table holds its own against them with quiet authority. Modest in footprint, the parents’ room solves its constraints by aligning bed, wardrobe, and dresser along a single wall—an oak bed in PU-finished beige keeps the whole composition understated and restful.

Daughter’s Room

The daughter’s room—a design student with a discerning eye—takes a deliberate detour. Lighter, brighter, built around a white distressed poster bed and a bay window that Studio Autumn introduced specifically to become a reading nook, with table and storage on either side. It complements the farmhouse grammar of the home while operating in an entirely different emotional key.

Ten months, full creative trust, and a process that Chintan describes as genuinely enjoyable. “Most things were finalised in the first go,” he reflects, “but we never stopped improvising.” Amber is the proof of that: a home whose best quality is the accumulation of meticulous decisions, culminating into an abode that will only keep becoming more itself with every passing year.

The Author is a Faculty at School of Design & Innovation, RV University, Bengaluru.

Fact File

Designed by: Studio Autumn

Project Type: Residential Villa Design

Location: Bangalore, India

Project Size: 3300 Sq.ft 

Principal Architect: Chintan Punjabi

Photograph Courtesy: Viswas Dhulesia

Text Courtesy: Mehar Deep Kaur

Products / Materials / Vendors: Living Sofa, Arm Chairs and MBR Dresser  – Gulmoharlane / Dining Table and Poster Bed – Dtail Modern / Decorative Lights: Whispering home, Purple Turtle

Firm’s Website Link: Studio Autumn

Firm’s Instagram Link: Studio Autumn

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