Exclusive E-Design Services - Limited Spots Available!

I was five when my grandfather, a classic furniture maker, brought home a catalogue with a few pages missing. He was flipping through it when I wandered over, curious about what he was looking at. I got drawn into the traditional detailing, the shapes, the silhouettes – the whole look and feel of the furniture pulled at something in me before I understood why. One day I picked up a blank page and started sketching, pulling shapes and silhouettes from what I had seen in that catalogue, just to see if I could draw and design something like it myself.

By seven, I was following my father, a commercial contractor, to his workshop after school. When I was nine, he had a serious accident and was bedridden for two years, so I started doing his quotations and his official letters for him. I remember worrying my handwriting looked too much like a child’s. He told me something I have never forgotten – they will read what you wrote, not how you wrote it. That’s stayed with me longer than almost anything else he taught me.

I built my first company at 21, while I was still studying. Not long after, I remember standing in a glass lift in one of the tallest buildings in my home town in India, looking out over a city I knew every corner of and realising something clearly – I would rather be a drop in the ocean than the biggest thing in a well.

At 32 life brought me to the UK – the pull to test myself somewhere new and marriage. When it came to choosing where to re-establish the studio, a different instinct took over – I chose Wiltshire over London. Not because it was smaller, but because it reminded me of where I had come from – overlooked, full of people nobody’s backing yet. That instinct still shapes how I choose to work.

By the time someone finds House of Pemberley, something has usually already shifted. They have outgrown the house they are in. The decor doesn’t feel like them any more. Something’s changed and they want the place around them to finally reflect it. Some of them have been let down by a builder before. Others don’t know yet that they are about to be.

Twenty years on, I have trained formally as an interior designer at an Italian institute and before re-establishing the studio here, spent time with renowned design studios in London including work on a Grade II listed mansion in Mayfair, one of the most significant private residences in the city. I have run sites, managed builds and sat across the table from clients who have been let down by someone before me. What I have learned in that time is that the hardest part of this work was never picking a palette. I am the engineer as much as the designer, the interpreter between what a client is dreaming about and what a builder can actually deliver. I handle the nuts and bolts so the client never has to know how close it came to going wrong.

That’s what House of Pemberley does. I am not the person who picks the colours. I am the bridge.