Dress Up Your Obscure passages, Corners, Corridors & Foyers

Obscure passages, corners, corridors and foyers are definitely areas we overlook often!

We do have the tendency to ignore these telltale areas that are the give-away’s to the caliber of a house and its attention to detail. When treated with ingenuity - a repertoire of columns, entablatures, brackets, pendulum lamps, swathes of drapery and surrealistically exaggerated vistas, complementing fanciful artificial foliage and throw rugs – these very nooks and otherwise ignored areas transform into fanciful focal points that amplify a goodlooking home. 

Corridors

Corridors naturally lend themselves to conversion into enigmatic art galleries instead of monotonous passages. An interior I am working on presently had a dark passageway leading into a large drawing room. I have designed interesting niches cut into the wall, with plywood backing, clad with mirror. The corridor is now imbued with color by way of Egyptian figurines that have been placed in the niches. These alluringly reflect themselves on the mirror, which forms the backdrop, amidst an intriguing chiaroscuro. The light comes from above each niche where it is recessed.

In my own home the corridor has Mario Miranda rubbing shoulders with Bikash Bhattacharya and Jatin Das juxtaposed with Bhaskaran and an old Goan alter - on either side of the three foot wide corridor. I call this my art gallery. It allows me to display my art and masks and sculptures, and then the rest of the house can have a selection of hung canvases rather than an unsightly overdose.

At the house of Bahadur Singh Jhala, brother of Princess of Morvi, we used the recess under his stairwell as a laundry room and it works wonderfully. However those of us in apartments must accommodate our machines elsewhere - the possibilities are endless. In a kitchen, woven within the myriad drawers and sliding panels one can design a unit where the machine can be installed in a lower unit - and the drying machine above it. So what about the soiled laundry? One of my favorites is a pull out laundry bin whose lid swings up at an angle and stops at a convenient thirty degrees from the floor, held on a hinge. The V-shaped compartment so formed is ideal until the clothes are removed. Lets not forget about the pull out or pull down iron board as above a drawer or wall or then cupboard hung respectively.

Nisha JamVwal
Photo Courtsey Nisha JamVwal Design