02 · Private Residence
Nocturne Residence
A collector’s townhouse designed around low light, deep colour and the theatre of a winter evening.
- Location
- Bengaluru, India
- Year
- 2024
- Area
- 410 m²
- Duration
- 18 months
The client, a collector of post-war Belgian painting, worked abroad and returned home only after dark. He asked, quite literally, for a house that looked its best at nine in the evening.
We inverted the usual hierarchy. Daylight was treated as a guest rather than a subject: windows were deepened and dressed, walls taken to charcoal, and the entire lighting scheme built from eighteen individually dimmable warm sources at below eye level.
- Interior architecture
- Bespoke furniture
- Lighting strategy
- Art consultation
- Obsidian#12100F
- Forest#1E3129
- Cognac#8A5A34
- Ember Brass#B6945A
- Fluted walnut
- Fumed, hand-oiled, 22mm reveals
- Verde Alpi marble
- Book-matched across the chimneypiece
- Charcoal lime paint
- Six coats, dead flat
- Cognac saddle leather
- Vegetable tanned, hand-stitched
A narrow house on a narrow street
Five metres wide and four storeys tall, the house offered almost no lateral light. Rather than fight the section, we leaned into it.
A vertical procession
The stair became the spine of the narrative — each landing a pause, each pause hung with a single work.
Ceiling heights were varied deliberately: compressed at the thresholds, released in the salon.
Depth before contrast
Nothing in the house is truly black. Every dark surface carries a warm undertone so that candlelight and low lamps can find something to hold.
Eighteen points of light
No downlights were used. The scheme is composed entirely of sconces, table lamps, picture lights and a single concealed cove — each on its own circuit.
Best at nine
The house was photographed only after sunset. It is, by design, a building that begins when the day ends.
“I have never lived somewhere that understood the hour I keep. It is the first house that has waited up for me.”
- Interior Architecture
- Nesva Studio
- Lighting Design
- Nesva Studio with Lumen Atelier
- Joinery
- Van Doren Ebenisterie
- Art Consultation
- Marguerite Osei
- Photography
- Théo Marchand
Next Project
Pearl Mansion
Mysore · 2024
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Let us compose a spacethat belongs only to you.
- Telephone
- +91 9999512096
- Studios
- India
- Availability
- Commissions worldwide
All enquiries are handled in confidence. A significant portion of our work is never published; where discretion is required, we operate under private terms and no imagery leaves the studio.