Inside a Bold Art Deco Villa in New Delhi Filled with a Lifetime's Worth of Globe-Spanning Finds

When you’re a man of the world, as Vikram Goyal surely is, making a new home for yourself must be laced with temptation. You’ve seen too much, read too much, and very probably dreamed too much to shrink your requirements down into anything as rational as a design brief.

Raised and now based in New Delhi, Goyal has been building his personal image bank for a lifetime. A successful furniture designer and self-described “craft revivalist,” as creative director of Vikram Goyal Studio and Viya, he has clients across the globe. He came to his profession circuitously. At Princeton, where he studied economics, Goyal marveled at the Venetian-Gothic student center and blanketed his dorm room with block-printed textiles and silk lampshades (“Probably the only decorated room on the entire quad,” he jokes). As a young economist in Manhattan, he haunted the galleries of the Frick Collection; on a two-year stint in Hong Kong, he made the China Club, the late David Tang’s glamorous evocation of a 1930s Shanghai nightspot, his second living room.

When Goyal came across this villa in the heart of New Delhi a few years ago, he’d long since returned to his home city. The house lured him back to his childhood neighborhood, an enclave sandwiched between Delhi’s Old Fort and Humayun’s Tomb, two monuments he considers to be among the most beautiful in India. Amid fort and tomb, now part of the axial grid laid out by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, a small green quarter established in the early 1950s is where he now makes his home. “It’s central, but it’s not part of the hullabaloo,” Goyal says. “I value serenity and quiet.”

His guests are often surprised to discover that the three-story stucco house was conceived in the Art Deco style. India took up Deco in the late 1920s, and confections like Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan Palace and the New Palace in Morbi were crafted to please maharajahs. But it was the more plebeian movie palaces and restaurants that popularized the fizzy style. When India gained independence in 1947, Deco was a convenient signifier of modernity writ large, and its influence continued.

As he began work on the house, Goyal realized it had a tale of its own to tell. The entry staircase, with clef-shaped railings and steps paved in matcha-colored terrazzo, started the conversation. “When I walked up the stairs the first time, I was like, “My gosh! I try to be bold with my interiors, but I couldn’t have imagined this,” he says. To up the glamour, Goyal outlined the walls and windows in jet-black molding, lending the rooms a tuxedo-piping effect.

Other than enlarging the kitchen and one of two dining rooms, he limited his interventions to essential repairs. When it came to the furnishings, though, Goyal cut loose. He decided to put a new narrative spin on his trove of art and objects, a harmonious approach that would stand up to the space’s bold framing and exaggerated proportions. (The 12-foot ceilings are almost unheard of in Delhi, where height restrictions are taken seriously.) Over a thali dinner in the red-lacquered dining room, his guests may lose sight of the meal in a sea of light from Goyal’s candlesticks, reflected in walls paved with Gujarati mirrors. The effect, he admits, may be more Venetian than Indian—“but that’s not such a bad thing.”

In a second dining room, Goyal’s Garden of Life wall panels—a collaboration with de Gournay—capture animals along the Silk Road in billows of gold and bronze, echoed in the cast-bronze base of Goyal’s table and also in ornaments and repoussé accessories from Viya, his lifestyle brand. Holding their own are a curious set of chairs from the designer’s grandfather. A riff on English Arts and Crafts, Viennese Secession, and chinoiserie, they have a shadowy provenance. “Various people who came to the family house in Jaipur would look at them and say, ‘Wow, they look like Charles Rennie Mackintosh,’ ” he remembers. “And we, of course, had no idea who Mackintosh was.”

By the time Goyal was old enough to inherit them, he did. But 10 chairs didn’t divide evenly between all the relatives who wanted them, so copies were made. He decided his set needed zhuzhing up, and he had seats of yellow silk brocade loomed in Benares by weavers to the Bhutanese royal family. The same artisans made the deliriously patterned emerald brocades in the living room—a telescoping run of spaces that encourages parties to spill over into increasingly intimate quarters, and where vintage carpets and works by Jamini Roy, Dayanita Singh, and M.F. Husain, among others, brighten the scene.

Of all the belongings Goyal has collected, Indian and otherwise, a suite of textile paintings from his grandfather offer the most poignant narrative. Devotional works known as Pichwai, they mirror his lifelong affection for the animal kingdom. Last month in London, Goyal debuted a new collection of furniture, wall panels, and objects, including monkey-themed brocades and turtle-patterned carpets, alongside jasmine-adorned vessels—inspired by the Ramayana, an Odyssey-like saga of loyalty, friendship, and sacrifice.

“I’m doing a lot of Indian storytelling these days,” Goyal muses. There’s an argument to be made that he always has.

This story appears in the November issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.