Vinay Kumar Nevatia on Home Design Trends Transforming Indian Interiors
New Delhi : Indian homes are getting bigger. Average home sizes across the top seven cities rose about 17% in two years, from roughly 1,420 sq ft in 2023 to 1,656 sq ft in 2025, according to ANAROCK Research. What is odd is that the extra space has not made anyone more formal about it. If anything, people want their rooms to work harder now than when the rooms were smaller.
(Note: Source — ANAROCK Research, average home size across top seven cities, data to 2025, released February 2026. https://www.freepressjournal.in/mumbai/mmr-home-sizes-expand-as-buyers-favour-larger-apartments-says-anarock)
Vinay Kumar Nevatia is a Chandigarh based home and interior designer who works mostly on small apartments, rentals and first homes. He says the change shows up before a project even starts, in how people describe what they want.
Ten years ago they opened with a style word. All white. Modern. Now they open with a complaint,he says. The room is dark. There's nowhere to put anything. It looks like a showroom and nobody sits in it.
Warm minimalism, and the end of the all-white flat
The cold clinical white flat is losing. Houzz's 2026 Kitchen Trends Study, which surveyed 1,780 homeowners, found wood is now the most popular cabinet colour in renovated kitchens at 29%, up six points in a year and just past white at 28%. That is US data, but the mood travels.
(Note: Source — Houzz, 2026 Houzz Kitchen Trends Study, published January 2026, fielded July 2025, n=1,780
(US data).https://pro.houzz.com/pro-learn/blog/2026-houzz-kitchen-trends-article)
The Indian version of the same instinct arrived in February, when Asian Paints named "Moonlit Silk" its Colour of the Year 2026. The company described it as a warm, luminous neutral answering "a collective longing for familiarity and emotional grounding in an overstimulated world."
( Note: Source — Asian Paints, ColourNext 2026 (23rd edition), announced February 2026. Company statement. https://www.asianpaints.com/colour-next.html )
Nevatia's word for the result is warm minimalism. Still uncluttered, but with texture in it, warmer neutrals, and a few things that actually mean something to the person living there. "Calm, not clinical," he says. "A white room photographs beautifully and lives badly."
Natural materials, and light as a material
Wood, stone, cane, cotton. Requests for these over high gloss synthetics have become ordinary in his practice. So has something clients never used to mention at all, which is air and light.
ANAROCK's H1 2025 homebuyer survey, covering 8,250 people across 14 Indian cities, found at least 72% want well ventilated homes. It ranked third, behind only timely project completion and construction quality.
(Note: Source — ANAROCK, Homebuyer Sentiment Survey H1 2025, n=8,250, 14 cities, January–June 2025. https://websitemedia.anarock.com/media/Homebuyer_Sentiment_Survey_H1_2025_e9f8bd6e5e.pdf)
He treats lighting as part of the design rather than something bought at the end from whatever the electrician had. The point is layers: one room that can be bright and useful at four in the afternoon and soft at nine, without rewiring anything.
"In a small home, light is the cheapest way to change a room," he says. "You can't move a wall in a rented flat. You can absolutely change what that room feels like in the evening."
Vinay Kumar Nevatia on rooms that have to do two jobs
Here the popular explanation is simply wrong. Indian flats are not shrinking and forcing rooms to double up. They are growing. The pressure comes from a different place, which is how much more a household now expects a home to hold.
Knight Frank's 2025 homebuying study found size and layout matter to 45% of buyers, who want spaces designed for comfort and function, and that upgrading to a larger home is the leading aspiration at 42% overall, rising to 53% among Gen Z buyers.
(Note: Source — Knight Frank India, Beyond Bricks: The Pulse of Home Buying 2025, n=1,629,cities.https://content.knightfrank.com/research/2999/documents/en/beyond-bricks-the-pulse-of-home-buying-2025-12177.pdf)
Vinay Kumar Nevatia designs for the overlap instead of fighting it. A corner that is a desk until seven and then isn't. A guest room that spends fifty weeks of the year as a study. His one hard condition is that switching between the two has to be fast.
"If converting the room takes ten minutes, nobody converts it," he says. "It just becomes a study with a bed in it. Thirty seconds, or don't bother."
Storage first, colour later
He settles storage before anyone picks a palette. His reasoning is that when people say they want a minimal room, what they usually mean is a room without clutter in it, and that is a storage problem wearing a style costume. Built in and vertical storage changes how a compact flat reads more than any colour decision made afterwards.
Sustainability that also happens to be cheaper
The value argument for sustainable choices is no longer necessary, at least for lighting, because the maths got there on its own.
Residential LEDs use at least 75% less energy and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs, per the US Department of Energy. India's UJALA programme has distributed over 36.87 crore LED bulbs, with estimated savings of 48.42 billion kWh a year and about ₹19,334 crore off consumer electricity bills annually.
Note: Sources — US Department of Energy, LED Lighting, energy.gov/energysaver/led-lighting · Energy Efficiency Services Limited (Government of India), UJALA programme dashboard. https://eeslindia.org/en/ourujala/
His own version of sustainability is unromantic. Mostly it means durability. He pushes clients toward materials and joinery that will still be fine in ten years rather than finishes that look wonderful in photographs and give up in three, on the straightforward grounds that the cheapest kitchen is the one you don't replace twice.
Personal beats catalogue perfect
This is the shift he likes most. Houzz's 2025 Bathroom Trends Study found 55% of renovating homeowners picked a fully custom or semi custom vanity over a stock one, and 31% put in an accent wall. Again, American figures.
(Note: Source — Houzz, 2025 Houzz Bathroom Trends Study, released September 2025, n=1,738 (US data). https://www.houzz.com/press/999/Homeowners-Prioritize-Accessibility-to-Future-Proof-Bathrooms-Houzz-Study-Reveals)
He is careful not to read too much into numbers from another country. But the direction matches : a colour someone genuinely likes, art that came from somewhere, a grandmother's cabinet given a wall instead of a storeroom.
Anyone planning to redo a space can see how he works through Vinay Kumar Nevatia.
Where the trends stop being useful
He is blunt about the limit. A trend gives you vocabulary. It does not give you a brief.
"Warm minimalism in a flat with three kids under ten is a magazine idea," he says. "Half my job is talking someone out of something they saw online, because the room they're describing isn't the life they're living in it."
His test is narrow and he applies it to everything: what actually happens in this room between six and ten in the evening. Rooms that survive that hour tend to survive the decade.
What this actually means
Bigger homes, warmer materials, better light, rooms doing more than one job. Put together it is a move away from styling and toward function, which is less exciting than a trend forecast and considerably more useful.
The flats that still feel right in 2036 will not be the ones that matched the 2026 palette. They will be the ones somebody planned around a real household. That is the argument Vinay Kumar Nevatia makes to every client who opens with a style word, and he loses it about half the time.
About Vinay Kumar Nevatia
Vinay Kumar Nevatia is a Chandigarh based home and interior designer working with small apartments, rentals and first time homeowners on budget smart layouts, storage and colour.
