Vikram Goyal's Art Deco Villa: A Lifetime of Global Treasures

Vikram Goyal, creative director of Vikram Goyal Studio and Viya, has filled a three-story Art Deco villa in New Delhi with a lifetime's worth of globe-spanning finds. The house sits between the Old Fort and Humayun's Tomb, two monuments he ranks among India's most beautiful.

The location is no accident. Goyal grew up nearby, in a green quarter laid out in the early 1950s within the axial grid designed by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. "It's central, but it's not part of the hullabaloo," Goyal says. "I value serenity and quiet."

How did an Art Deco house end up in Delhi?

India embraced Deco in the late 1920s, and palaces such as Jodhpur's Umaid Bhawan Palace and the New Palace in Morbi were built to please maharajahs. The style spread further through movie palaces and restaurants. After independence in 1947, Deco served as a convenient signifier of modernity.

The villa spoke early. The entry staircase, with clef-shaped railings and steps paved in matcha-colored terrazzo, set the tone. "When I walked up the stairs the first time, I was like, 'My gosh! I try to be bold with my interiors, but I couldn't have imagined this,'" Goyal says. He outlined the walls and windows in jet-black molding, giving the rooms what he calls a tuxedo-piping effect.

Beyond enlarging the kitchen and one of two dining rooms, he limited his interventions to essential repairs. The furnishings were another matter. The 12-foot ceilings are almost unheard of in Delhi, where height restrictions are taken seriously, and the objects had to match that scale.

What's inside the rooms?

The red-lacquered dining room hosts thali dinners lit by Goyal's candlesticks, reflected in walls paved with Gujarati mirrors. The effect, he admits, may be more Venetian than Indian — "but that's not such a bad thing."

A second dining room holds his Garden of Life wall panels, a collaboration with de Gournay, depicting animals along the Silk Road in gold and bronze. They echo the cast-bronze table base and repoussé accessories (metal shaped by hammering from the reverse side) from Viya, his lifestyle brand.

The most curious pieces are ten chairs inherited from his grandfather — a riff on English Arts and Crafts, Viennese Secession and chinoiserie, with a shadowy provenance. "Various people who came to the family house in Jaipur would look at them and say, 'Wow, they look like Charles Rennie Mackintosh,'" Goyal remembers. "And we, of course, had no idea who Mackintosh was."

Ten chairs don't divide evenly among relatives, so copies were made. Goyal had new seats of yellow silk brocade loomed in Benares by weavers who work for the Bhutanese royal family. The same artisans made the emerald brocades in a living room hung with works by Jamini Roy, Dayanita Singh and M.F. Husain.

Where did the collecting begin?

Goyal came to design circuitously. He studied economics at Princeton, where he blanketed his dorm room with block-printed textiles and silk lampshades — "Probably the only decorated room on the entire quad," he jokes. As a young economist in Manhattan, he haunted the Frick Collection; in Hong Kong, he made David Tang's China Club his second living room.

The most poignant holdings are devotional textile paintings known as Pichwai, from his grandfather, mirroring his lifelong affection for the animal kingdom. Last month in London, Goyal debuted a new collection of furniture, wall panels and objects — monkey-themed brocades, turtle-patterned carpets and jasmine-adorned vessels — inspired by the Ramayana, an Odyssey-like saga of loyalty, friendship and sacrifice.

"I'm doing a lot of Indian storytelling these days," Goyal muses. There's an argument, the record suggests, that he always has.

The story appears in the November issue of AD.