Furnishing a Gurgaon Home From Abroad — How It Actually Works

It's 11 PM in London. The handover email from Gurgaon says the keys are ready. The container ships in six weeks.

Furnishing from abroad usually goes wrong the same way. Five vendors, five WhatsApp groups, a relative doing site visits as a favour, and decisions waiting for the next flight home.

The distance isn't the problem. The number of people between you and the furniture is.

What happens on video

• The consult. A private hour on video — plans on screen. Some of the sharpest sessions I've had were with families abroad. More on the consult.
• The brief. Who will live there — parents, children, staff. How you entertain. What you cook. What you'll keep from the life you're leaving.
• The inventory. What's in the shipment, room by room. Clothes, crockery, books, art, the things that came back with you.
• The layout. Furniture plan, wardrobe interiors, kitchen drawers — drawn and approved before anything is cut.

Design around the shipment list, not the boxes

The container lands. Forty boxes in the living room. And the wardrobes were drawn for someone else's life.

Send the shipment list before the storage is designed. A wardrobe can be drawn around clothes from two climates. A crockery wall can be drawn around the dinner service you carried across the world. Not after.

The one trip that matters

Some decisions need your hands on them:

• The stone for the dining table and the kitchen counter.
• The veneer — figure, colour, how it's matched.
• Fabric and leather for anything you'll sit on every day.
• Sitting on the sofa frame before it's upholstered.

Plan one working trip around those. Bundle them. Everything else can move on video.

The family who came home

When the Kalsis moved back to India, they wanted a home that felt unmistakably Indian in its warmth and craft — and international in its finish. Mother-of-pearl swirled by hand across the dining table. Book-matched veneers in the bedrooms.

Four years later the family came back for their son's home in the same tower. Entirely different taste. See all three →

The strongest review a practice can earn is the same family, twice.

Questions to ask before you hire from abroad

1. Who builds the furniture — and who do I call when something's wrong?
2. How will I see progress without flying in?
3. Which decisions need me physically present, and can they be done in one trip?
4. Who is on site the day it's installed?

My answer to the first one: me. Every piece is built in my factory in Delhi and installed under my supervision. Since 1998.