Shabnam Gupta Thinks Your Home Can Handle More
India has never had a problem with colour. Walk through any market, any temple, any old family home, it's everywhere, instinctive, almost cellular. What's shifting now is our relationship with it. Colour is no longer just inherited or incidental; it's becoming intentional. Less a cultural backdrop, more a conscious design choice. Shabnam Gupta (IG:@shabnamguptainteriors) has spent years helping people make that move, and she has thoughts.
Stop designing from fear.
When a client says, 'I love colour, but I'm scared,' Shabnam hears something specific. "There's a fear of expressing too much personality. Neutral spaces feel emotionally safer because they're universally accepted." Most people don't actually dislike colour. They've just never seen it used in a way that feels balanced and livable. A lot of her work is simply helping clients trust their own instincts again.
The neutral home isn't over. The emotionally flat home is.
Whites, creams, warm greiges, they're not going anywhere. Calm and timelessness still matter. But the global design moment that equated minimal with luxurious produced something unfortunate: homes that look interchangeable. What people are asking for now, even when they still want neutrals, is depth. Texture, contrast, darker tones, unexpected accents. Something that reveals who lives there.
Lighting is doing more work than your paint colour.
If there's one thing to change tomorrow, it's this. The same shade can read cold, muddy, warm or intimate depending entirely on natural light, shadow, and the temperature of your bulbs. "Colour is relational," Shabnam says. "It changes depending on what surrounds it." Don't choose a colour in isolation. Look at it at different times of day, next to your fabrics, your flooring, your art. Then change your bulbs and look again.
Texture is a colour decision.
This one gets missed constantly. A deep green in velvet is a completely different proposition to the same green in a gloss finish. Natural materials soften colour. Age softens it. Texture absorbs it. The emotional response to colour is always layered; paint is just one part of the equation.
On the colours people resist the most.
Deep reds. Jewel tones. Oxblood, aubergine. People are drawn to them, and then they pull back, worried the space will feel like too much, or that they'll tire of it. Shabnam's view: when used with nuance, these colours are often the most grounding ones in the room. They create intimacy in a way lighter neutrals can't. The resistance usually comes from seeing them used badly online, full saturation, no balance. Context changes everything.
One dramatic gesture is not a colour strategy.
The impulse to do one big thing, a bright wall, a statement sofa, is understandable but limiting. The most beautiful colourful homes feel layered, not loud. Colour woven gradually through materials, textiles, objects, art, books, and patina. And the wrong question to be asking is 'Is this colour on trend?' The right one: 'How do I want this room to feel?'
The rooms people underestimate.
Powder bathrooms, for one, the short duration of time spent there makes immersive colour completely livable. And dining rooms, which are surprisingly underexplored given how central food and gathering are to Indian home life. The transitional spaces, the smaller rooms, that's often where colour can do its most interesting work.
Where Shabnam herself has landed.
Earlier, more instinctive and expressive. Now, more drawn to restraint, tonality, and emotional depth. "Colours that unfold slowly. That reveal themselves differently through the day, through texture and light." Less statement, more atmosphere. It's a shift that tends to happen when you've looked at enough rooms, travelled enough, and let enough time pass. The subtleties start to matter more than the gesture.
