A famous designer once said that Interior Designers are like storytellers, hired by clients to write their biographies, but instead of words and punctuations, they use fabrics, furniture, and architectural elements to make the spaces come alive. Ar. Niel Parekh and Ar. Pooja Shah’s vision resonates with this ideology as they create spaces that breathe. Their venture The Company of Design (The Co.De) is a multifaceted design firm which believes that design should not be confined to any one dimension. Explore the journey of this duo, who defined everything from space to character:
The Beginning:
Niel and Pooja were batch-mates while they pursued Architecture as their field of study. Their transition from friends to lovers, and now to a married couple has not altered their love for design, even one bit. Although their journey started together, they both parted ways in their initial years of career and learnt a plethora of things individually from different mentors. Today, they work together as partners in The Co.De, where they primarily specialize in Architecture, Interior design, Retail Space design and urban design.
Living in Detail:
Their way of approaching a new project starts with a profound analysis of the space, the inhabitants, their lifestyle, and requirements. They believe that every space has a character of its own and it is for us to identify the traits and organize it in a way that every small piece falls into its own place. To treat the space as an entity is their foremost and indispensable step of the whole designing process. And hence when they take up a project they let the walls, floor and everything in between, breathe and only then they organize a plan to arrange them to a compatible aura with the user’s vicinity. The team starts with setting out the design process and weighing the choices, analyzing space, and working out as what all could be done to improve the ergonomics of an expanse. To ensure that not even a single item, be it as small as a vase or frame, is ever placed anywhere for the sake of it. In fact, they take a mandatory period of one month to simply study their subject and no work is ever done within that time
Blurring Lines:
Sharing life and work can become a bit too much for anyone, but not for this duo. Whether they go vacationing in places or steal some time alone for themselves, their centrifugal point of discussion always comes back to architecture and design. Their passion for details can be felt in the spaces that they curate. To detox, their minds of the ideas that occupy it, both of them teach Architecture students in college. This once in a week event let them vent out and come afresh with new ones. Together they bring forward the existing beauty of a space to life with their felicity. Their idea is to use the tangible elements to create a design which would bring out the intangibles emotions in the end user of the space. They believe in architectural practice it is not the style of an architect that pivotal for the design but the context that forges it. After all, what else is design but a method of alchemy to transform the ordinary into something beautiful, rare and usable.