A global visual vocabulary.A deeply personal way of designing.

I was born in Kuwait to Indian parents, into a city full of people who were all from somewhere else. Expat life is its own culture: everyone carrying a country in their luggage, everyone improvising.

My mother was extraordinary at it. She could take a rented apartment in a foreign country and make it unmistakably ours — the textiles, the smells from the kitchen, the way a room was arranged for people who hadn’t arrived yet but definitely would.

That was my first design education. Nobody called it that. I just thought it was what mothers did.

Then the Gulf War, and we left.

We landed in India, into joint family living — a house with more people in it than I had ever seen in one place, and a cultural volume I had absolutely no preparation for. I arrived displaced and confused.

I left knowing exactly where I came from.

We went back. And I got to watch something most people never see: an entire country putting itself back together.

I also watched my father do it on a smaller scale — rebuilding our life from the studs. New friends, some old ones, a foundation laid again piece by piece. Socially, financially, culturally.

What followed was genuinely the best childhood I could have asked for. Eastern culture, Western comforts, and no sense that those two things were in conflict.

The lesson stuck: rebuilding isn’t something that happens to you. It’s a skill.

Then I left all of it for university in the US.

I went from deeply sheltered to entirely on my own more or less overnight. Grades, jobs, friendships, homesickness, the full catalogue of highs and lows.

And in the middle of all that — a dorm room. Then a first apartment. Then another one. Each time, almost no money and the same compulsion: make this feel like home before you’ve earned the right to call it that.

Missing home, it turns out, is a design brief.

New coast, new life, new city I loved immediately.

Then the financial collapse took my job with it.

So I taught myself things I didn’t know in order to stay professionally alive, and I found another one. The market did not care that I had already rebuilt from nothing once before.

Fortunately, I had.

I run a studio I built myself, and I’m expanding it on purpose rather than by accident.

I’m raising two girls who will know precisely who they are and where they come from — because that was the one thing nobody could take out of the luggage.

And I design spaces for people whose lives don’t fit a template, because mine never has.