Copyright vogue
Growing up, my bedroom never truly felt like mine because it was filled with choices made for me—the colour of the walls, the shape of the drawers, the design of the Formica sheets, even the size of the fan. In college, despite being on a shoestring budget, I was adamant about making the tiny room in the girls’ hostel feel like a reflection of the person I had grown into. It felt tentative, like testing boundaries I wasn’t sure I was allowed to cross. Indian women have been raised with the idea that ‘home’ isn’t something they shape but something they adjust to. We’re born into an already-designed home, and we move into an already-designed home when we marry. But today, thanks to women who work long hours and want to come back to a space where they can unwind, or women simply becoming more assertive in general, we’re setting up apartments alone, negotiating shared spaces with flatmates and carving out corners in in-laws’ homes. When Bhavya, 33, moved into her in-laws’ home during lockdown, she found herself suppressing design preferences. Her string lights with intimate polaroids, fridge magnets and bold artwork went into a box in the attic, tucked away out of sight. “Technically, I did have control over what I wanted my room to look like since no one explicitly objected. But deep down, it felt like I shouldn’t change anything. I thought I’d be judged or, at the very least, be invading someone else’s home, even though it was supposed to be mine, too.” Describing that familiar feeling of women’s spatial freedoms coming with invisible caveats, she says, “It’s similar to having a great leave policy at work, but the environment doesn’t support actually taking days off.” “I’ve always had a clear vision for my space, and I’ve been collecting ideas in a little folder,” says Vrushali, 32, a senior art director who’s always trying to frame her surroundings like a cinematic still. Her space is a declaration of selfhood for her. “It’s unapologetically mine and built around solitude, creativity and fierce independence.” Moving away from the TV-on-the-wall setup, Vrushali built herself a personal cinema in her projector-equipped bedroom, glowing with soft, warm light. “This phase of my life is intentionally about me, and I wanted my home to reflect that with clarity,” she says. “Someday, I’d love to share it with someone, but I think there’s a unique joy in having a phase of life that’s lived entirely for yourself. I don’t take this lightly. I know the cost of this freedom, and I carry a deep, quiet gratitude for it.” In a country where women’s homes are often defined by who they live with, Vrushali has flipped the equation and built her space around solitude itself, treating her independence as a design choice. Puja, 34, a chef consultant, has set up her home to meet her emotional and aesthetic needs of warm yellow lights and dim corners. “White lights make me inexplicably sad. My home needs to feel soft, quiet, alive, slightly chaotic, and full of memory.” Although humbler than the house with the porch and the garden she once imagined living in, it delivers on the promise of being hers. “The bookshelves are too full, the bar cabinet has too much stuff, the artwork does not make sense, the kitchen is overflowing with stuff,” Puja laughs, recalling the judgment she’s encountered. “Sometimes, the most functional part of my home is a pile of cookbooks stacked beside a pouffe I never sit on, or the chair with the pile of clothes, or the bench next to the entryway that looks clunky to some but perfect to me. I’ve learned to arrange my space not to impress, but to feel safe and to feel like me.” In many ways, Puja’s rejection of conventional ‘Pinterest-perfect’ beauty ideals is its own form of rebellion that insists women don’t have to curate their homes into showroom-y neatness. But what if one’s space isn’t theirs alone to define? For Kopal, who lives in a rented flat with two other flatmates and a cat, carving out her identity in the shared space required some negotiation and compromises on everyone’s part. But as the primary owner of most of the furniture, the onus of shaping the home fell largely on her, forcing her to balance responsibility with self-expression. “I have a lot of paintings and posters, and a bunch of artefacts from my friends and family. Then, there are my plants,” she says, pointing to her balcony. Brimming with over 20 plants, it has become a shared source of peace, and the most ‘me’-corner of her house. In a sense, Kopal’s living situation is a rehearsal for the larger negotiations women are expected to perform in their marital families. And by refusing to let her visions fade into the background even in a shared flat, she has created a corner that’s indisputably hers. For me, too, my home—that I share with my partner and our cats—has become a canvas lined with my own art that reflects both my taste and my neurodivergent way of inhabiting space. If Vrushali and Puja’s homes are shrines to individuality, Bhavya’s story underscores how women’s desires for space can be muted by inherited traditions, while Kopal’s reveals the compromises of shared living. Their stories are blueprints of resistance, and proof that within every wall—no matter who built it—women can and must claim a room, or at the very least, a corner, of their own. Why Indian women and finance are not a match made in heaven Why do working mothers in India struggle to delegate tasks at home as well as the office? 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