This 165-square-foot kitchen sits inside an 84-year-old heritage building at Marine Drive, Mumbai — part of a 3BHK that hadn't been touched since the 1950s. The brief was to bring in a modern, functional kitchen without losing what made the building worth keeping, for a woman from a Gujarati household who cooks often and needed real storage for her pots, pans and grain boxes — non-negotiable, by her own word.

We kept the original wooden door, ventilators and window exactly where they were, scraping, buffing and polishing them back to life rather than replacing them. Storage runs floor to ceiling: deep teal blue drawers and shutters below the counter, cream cabinetry above finished in back-painted glass that matches the ceiling colour, and the building's own generous loft put back to work for suitcases, mattresses and everything else that doesn't need daily reach.

A geometric splashback tile, its metallic silver picking up hints of the same deep teal on the drawers below, is the room's one deliberate pop of colour against an otherwise muted grey palette — carried through in the countertops, a stain-resistant white composite stone with grey speckling that ties the wall tile's grey to the splashback's silver. Focused spotlighting sits over the gas hob counter, and every surface — counters and otlas alike — was built in this same composite stone before the modular kitchen was integrated into it, the way we do on every project.