DNA Exclusive| Inside Alia Bhatt's new home that she shares with sister Shaheen

Alia Bhatt is now a proud home owner. Here are excerpts from Architectural Digest India’s October 2016 issue where she talks about living with sister Shaheen, her preference when it comes to what becomes a part of her private space and that one thing that she had to have in her house:

Nothing overtly glamorous
It was during the shooting of the Vikas Bahl-directed Shaandaar that Alia Bhatt met Richa (Vikas’s wife), whom she would end up asking to design her new house. Although there was no real brief, she was very clear about what she didn’t want. “I told Richa I didn’t want it to be too modern. I wanted it to feel a little old, with a New York loft kind of feel. And I didn’t want anything overtly glamorous, like chandeliers, or marble floors.” She purchased the house two years ago, choosing it over two others she had seen, because of its closeness to her parents’ house. “It was really a no-brainer for me,” she says, with much more confidence than you would expect from a 23-year-old speaking of her first home.

Division of space
The renovation took around a year and a half, and the space’s four bedrooms were reconfigured to three. Richa fashioned Alia’s dressing room into a separate space to ensure the rest of the house would be private, even if the actress was in the midst of fittings. “You know, when she’s getting ready it’s not just her. There’s the stylist, the make-up artists, the spot boys, the ironing guys... it’s like a mela in there,” says Richa, in mild horror. A lobby now separates that space from the large living room, which has turned out to be a cosy mix of New York loft and Swiss chalet, with white walls, comfortable sofas, concrete-tiled floors and expansive windows that incongruously — though not unpleasantly — look out to Mumbai’s very tropical trees.
The palette here is surprisingly mature. Alia wanted the space to be as completely removed from the glamour associated with Bollywood as possible, and even the lighting is muted, in deliberate contrast to the harsh spotlight — literal and figurative — in which the actress usually finds herself.

A tea bar for Alia and Shaheen
The one thing the sisters insisted on in the house was a “tea bar”, because apparently, they’re both “really into tea. Just totally obsessed,” says Alia, sounding like a sprightly octogenarian. It’s hard to imagine anyone (young or old) comfortably drink tea while perched up on a bar stool, but the hip flask on the bar counter that reads, “I didn’t text you, vodka texted you,” indicates that other beverages might be served as well.

(The story appeared on Architectural Digest first. Read the full version here)