The first thing Rina Singh noticed was the light. Not the square footage, not the layout, not the asking price. The light coming in through windows over years that knows exactly where to fall.
"It felt like homes in old cities," she says. "Like there was a resident soul already there."
She and her husband Sandeep Singh, both designers and both well-trained in the art of not betraying eagerness during a property visit, walked through the Gurugram row house in 2018 and immediately agreed, in silence, to want it badly.
The mango tree in the backyard sealed it. "We both just manifested it in the same moment," she laughs. A year later, the house was theirs.
That instinct, to feel a space before you think it, is the same one that built Eka, Singh's textile and garment label, into one of the most beloved craft-led fashion brands in India. Since 2011, Eka has worked with handlooms and artisan families across India, growing from four families to nearly 2,000. Her clothes are often described as poetry in fabric. Her home, it turns out, speaks the same language. Whether a single home can carry all that weight is the question the house seems determined to answer.
The colony where the Singhs live is about 25 years old, ancient by Gurugram standards. The trees are mature, the streets carry the unhurried feeling of a place built before the city lost its nerve and went vertical. Singh is clear-eyed: "The multi-storey buildings are just making it more and more congested. We had enough land. We could have spread out. Instead, we built multi-storeys and added to the problem."
Adding character
Inside, the duplex opens into common space rather than retreating from it. A few walls came down to let light travel front to back, but the original bones stayed. "The house had its own beauty in the way it was designed," she says. What they added was character: terrazzo floors, terracotta tiles from the South, old bricks barely an inch wide in the backyard, antique doors salvaged from various travels. Nothing polished, nothing artificial. Walls left pleasingly undone.
The centrepiece of the living room is three carved wooden panels from Ladakh, likely broken pieces of a monastery door, each depicting the goddess Tara against a ground of turquoise. She had them mounted like art. Nearby sit eggshell figurines of Vietnamese fishermen, built up in a lacquer technique she still doesn't entirely understand but couldn't leave behind. The sourcing logic, if there is one, is feeling over provenance. "I'm forever looking," she says. "Things that come from the past carry with them the perseverance of time."
The living room is her favourite room. From there she can see the backyard through one end, the front yard through the window, and above, a double-height opening that sends light straight down into the room. The mango tree filters it differently at each hour. "The time during the afternoons is very beautiful," she says.
Sandeep, by contrast, is a minimalist. Clean lines, Zen leanings, and an interest in gardening that has quietly colonised the front yard, back terrace and everywhere in between. Singh is, by her own admission, a hoarder. There was the occasional disagreement as to the interior of the house: the rustic impulse is present but checked, one strong antique piece in the living room instead of a dozen, art that is bought and considered rather than decorative.
Neither designer quite got the house they might have built alone, which is perhaps why it works. "We weren't trying to prove what we are as designers," she says. "We wanted the house to speak of the character of the people who would live there. Where we come from."
Leaning into nostalgia
Where they come from is middle-class India, the village-and-boarding-school kind, the generation before visible wealth. That shapes everything. The terrazzo floor is not a trend choice, it is a memory. The old brick in the backyard is not merely for beauty, it is familiarity.
"Whoever we are, our authentic voice only comes from nostalgia," Singh says. "A lot of beauty that was innately India was always there. We just never made it a language of our own."
Her clothes, she has said, are for people who want to write their own story. Her house is the same proposition made in plaster and wood and light.
"Living poetically means you don't have to define everything," she says. "You leave room for abstraction." The mango tree, the monastery panels, the eggshell fishermen, the morning light pooling on terrazzo: none of it is a statement. All of it is a feeling. The resident soul was always there. She just moved in with it.