Shabnam Gupta seated on the pig-shaped wooden stool

Interior designer Shabnam Gupta starts with a huge watery advantage in her sprawling apartment in Juhu, Mumbai. Her living room balcony looks out onto a breathtaking stretch of sea and beach. Gupta has built on this and given her home a casual Mediterranean feel — with an Indian twist of course.

So you have moss-covered pebbles on the coffee tables, starfish hanging from the walls, and coral and shells encrusted all over the bathrooms, shelves and cupboards. “When we moved into this house a few years back, we wanted to have a spacious feel and a warm environment,”she explains, waving at the room around her.

Gupta, who comes from a large joint family (she’s the granddaughter of filmmaker Ramanand Sagar), believes that a family that eats together, stays together. So she designed a large teak dining table and made a bench surrounding it for everyone to sit around. Also, there are white chairs at the table which are painted with ferns and flowers. “I was used to eating together with my cousins and family. So the first thing I wanted was a large dining space,” she says.

Bright cushions and a snazzy coffee table add zing to the drawing room

Gupta isn’t afraid to improvise and borrow ideas. Above the dining table, there’s a suspended lamp, that resembles a broom, which she designed. It has been made using copper wires. The design inspiration came after a trip to Italy where she spotted an attractive high-end lighting system. “It was exorbitantly priced. So when I came back I sat down with my design team and came up with this one,” she says.

The kids’ room has bunk beds and colourful funky walls; (above) Gupta’s bedroom is cosy, with walls painted white and a large mattress which functions as her bed

Sparklingly stylish lighting is, in fact, a key feature of Gupta’s home. In the living room, for instance, there is a floor lamp in one corner made of wire-mesh. Also, the room is lit up by a wrought-iron chandelier and has star-shaped wrought iron candle stands in each of the corners. And above the bar there’s a wrought iron lamp. In the children’s bathroom there are fibreglass lamps.

The relaxed Mediterranean feel comes from special touches like the white walls near the main door with uneven plaster of Paris. Since she’s an art collector, her walls are also dressed up with paintings by contemporary artists like Sunil Padwal, Chintan Upadhyay, Amit Tandon and Nikhil Chaganlal.

Gupta has kept the look casual and doesn’t get fazed when her two tiny tots jump about on the sofas and draw on the walls. “I see to it that these marks can be easily wiped off,” she says. The apartment’s flooring is in scratchproof black granite.

The flat is large, but not that huge, so the entertainment zone has been carved out of a part of the living room. Gupta’s bedroom is cosily done up again in white and there’s just a large mattress which functions as her bed. Next to it, is a mandir which she designed herself. “According to Vastu, you cannot have a mandir inside the master bedroom. But I just went ahead with it because I needed a peaceful area to pray,” she says.

The kids’ bedroom is colourful and funky. The wall cabinet in the bedroom has ant-shaped handles made of wrought iron and bee-shaped lights. The white walls are painted with trees, and flowers by her sister Ganga Kadakia.

Many of the pieces have their own stories to tell. There’s the hanging candle stand which she has designed out of wrought iron next to the kids room. But her kids’ favourite is the pig-shaped stool gifted by an architect.

Gupta firmly believes that her home should look earthy and comfortable. And she hopes that this apartment overlooking the sea reflects the personality of the owner.