The Founder and CEO of IMARAA has spent 13 years building a practice around a simple belief — that the most enduring interiors are also the most responsible ones.
Arpita Subbaiah founded IMARAA in Bangalore without a particularly dramatic founding story. There was no single moment of revelation, no pivot away from a different career. She had spent her formative years at one of the city's established interior design firms, understood how the work got done, and decided she wanted to do it differently — not in aesthetic terms, but in terms of what the practice stood for. The rest followed.
The studio she runs today, based on Embassy Golf Links Road in Domlur, operates across luxury residential interiors, turnkey design and build, and what she describes simply as responsible sourcing. The language is understated by design. Studios in London doing comparable work — Celine Interior Design, Nicola Harding & Co, practices that have built reputations on quality and discretion rather than volume — tend to speak the same way. The work is the argument.
What is less common, at least in Bangalore's luxury interior design market, is the degree to which IMARAA has made sustainability a structural commitment rather than a marketing position. But sustainability, in Arpita's practice, is only one layer of a much deeper attention to detail. A home, she maintains, is only truly finished when every element within it has been considered — not just the walls and the floors, but the objects that live on the shelves, the pieces arranged on a dining table, the way a collection of ceramics sits together in a room. Styling, in her view, is not decoration applied at the end. It is the final argument the space makes about itself. IMARAA’s projects are handed over complete to that level — because anything less, she would say, is simply an unfinished sentence.
When you specify a material that off-gasses into a family's home, you are making a choice. We have simply made a different one.
Across 13 years and more than 500 projects, Arpita has developed what she calls a narrative approach to interior design — a phrase that sounds more abstract than it is in practice. It means she is slow to begin. The early conversations are not about aesthetics. They are about how a household actually functions: where the day starts, where it ends, which rooms carry the most daily traffic and which are quietly neglected.
"A space should feel inevitable," she says. "When you walk into a well-designed room, you should not be aware of the designer. You should only feel that this is exactly right." It is the kind of observation that only makes sense after enough projects to know what the alternative looks like — rooms that are visually accomplished but somehow unconvincing, spaces that announce themselves rather than serve the people in them.
The sourcing side of the practice has developed along similar lines. India's craft traditions — weaving lineages, stone-carving communities, metalwork families — represent a depth of making that most studios don't have the patience to access properly. Arpita has spent years building relationships with artists and procurement specialists across the country. What arrives in a finished IMARAA space as a result carries provenance that wholesale sourcing cannot replicate. Whether or not the client knows the full story, she maintains, the room knows.
The overlooked rooms are where the real texture of a home lives — a corridor, a utility space, a reading corner nobody mentioned in the brief.
Running a studio and running a design practice are two different disciplines, and Arpita has had to develop both in parallel. IMARAA now operates as a fully integrated practice — civil works, electrical, procurement, and creative direction under one roof — which requires a management structure that a purely design-led operation does not.
Her approach to building the team reflects the same thinking she applies to material decisions: clear on standards, open on everything else. She is not trying to build a studio in her own image. She is trying to build one where the standards hold regardless of who is running the project.
"I don't want people who replicate my taste," she says. "I want people who share my standards. Taste is personal. Standards are professional. Within that distinction, every person on the team should bring something the studio doesn't already have." It is, as management philosophies go, both simple and genuinely difficult to execute — which is perhaps why so few studios articulate it that clearly.
The practice backs every project with a ten-year craftsmanship warranty and a dedicated after-sales programme. It is, in Arpita's framing, less a commercial offer than a statement of confidence in the work. Clients, she notes, tend to notice.
IMARAA is still a relatively young studio by the standards of the practices it is quietly being compared to. What it has, at this stage, is a clear point of view and a body of work that reflects it consistently. In a market where luxury interior design can drift toward spectacle, that kind of steadiness is its own form of differentiation. Arpita Subbaiah seems content to let it speak for itself.
IMARAA is a full-service interior design studio based in Domlur, Bengaluru. The practice specialises in luxury residential interiors, turnkey design and build, smart home integration, and sustainable material specification. Sustainable Design. Conscious Luxury. Inspired Living.
www.IMARAAdesigns.com
contact@IMARAAdesigns.com
+91 99005 56580
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