Art Deco Interiors Revival: What Indian Sustainable Architects Can Learn

When Sydney-based interiors studio YSG transformed a 95-square-metre apartment in a 1929 art deco building in Redfern into the award-attracting residence called The Gentleman, they did more than restore chamfered surfaces and warm ochre hues — they demonstrated that adaptive reuse of heritage buildings is among the most carbon-efficient design strategies available today. The project, widely covered by Dezeen, reinstated original high-ceilinged proportions, preserved the building's structural bones, and layered contemporary comfort over a century-old framework overlooking the Sydney Opera House. For Indian architects, interior designers, and sustainable building professionals, this is far more than an aesthetic case study. India has tens of thousands of pre-independence and early post-independence buildings — colonial-era bungalows in Pune, art deco residential blocks along Mumbai's Marine Drive, Lutyens-era structures in Delhi — that are candidates for exactly this kind of heritage-sensitive, low-embodied-carbon retrofit. As India pushes toward net-zero buildings under the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act 2022 and BEE's Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC), the YSG approach offers a replicable template that aligns heritage conservation with green design goals.

Why Does Art Deco Matter for Indian Sustainable Architecture?

India owns one of the world's largest and most intact collections of art deco residential and civic architecture. Mumbai's Marine Drive and Oval Maidan precinct — recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2018 alongside Mumbai's Victorian Gothic buildings — contains over 100 art deco structures dating from the 1930s and 1940s. Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bengaluru each hold significant stocks of pre-independence apartment buildings whose original designs incorporated passive cooling strategies: high ceilings (precisely the feature YSG preserved in Redfern), thick masonry walls, deep verandahs, and cross-ventilation corridors. These features dramatically reduce mechanical cooling loads — critical in a country where air conditioning already accounts for roughly 10 percent of total electricity consumption and is projected by TERI to double by 2030. Adaptive reuse of such buildings — as YSG executed in Sydney — avoids the approximately 400 kg of CO₂ per square metre of embodied carbon associated with new construction. For a 95-sqm apartment, that is a saving of nearly 38 tonnes of CO₂ before a single occupant switches on a light.

Indian heritage conservationists have long argued for exactly this economic and environmental case. The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) has identified over 60,000 buildings across India as heritage-worthy, yet fewer than 3,000 have any active conservation or adaptive reuse plan. The gap between identified potential and executed projects represents not just a cultural loss but a measurable sustainability opportunity — one that Indian architects trained in contemporary green building practice are increasingly well-placed to bridge.

How Can Indian Designers Apply the YSG Retrofit Model?

The YSG methodology in The Gentleman project rests on three transferable principles: structural retention, material warmth, and biophilic layering. Structural retention — keeping original walls, floors, and ceiling heights — is the single biggest embodied-carbon saving a renovation can achieve, and it is equally viable in a 1935 Mumbai chawl conversion or a 1940s Connaught Place flat in Delhi. Material warmth, achieved by YSG through warm-toned plaster, timber joinery, and brass fixtures, maps cleanly onto India's vernacular material palette: Jaisalmer limestone, Agra red sandstone, teak and sheesham wood, and Athangudi tiles from Tamil Nadu are all low-transport, regionally sourced materials that carry low embodied energy compared with imported marble or aluminium composites. The biophilic layering — introducing indoor plants, natural textiles, and tactile surfaces — is supported by GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment), India's national green building rating system, which awards credits for indoor air quality and occupant wellbeing measures. Studios like Mumbai's Serie Architects, Khosla Associates in Bengaluru, and Sameep Padora & Associates have already demonstrated hybrid heritage-green projects, but the YSG case provides a tightly documented 95-sqm reference project that smaller Indian practices can study and adapt.

The financial case is equally compelling for Indian clients. A 2023 study by the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Associations of India (CREDAI) found that green-certified residential buildings command a 5–12 percent price premium in metros including Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. Adaptive reuse projects that retain structural elements typically reduce construction costs by 20–35 percent versus full demolition-and-rebuild, while simultaneously qualifying for GRIHA or IGBC Green Homes certification — certifications that state governments in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu now require for projects above certain floor area thresholds.

What This Means for India's Energy Transition

India's clean energy ambition is rightly dominated by the headline target of 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, with MNRE, SECI, and developers like Adani Green Energy and ReNew Power driving utility-scale solar and wind at pace. But the building sector contributes approximately 33 percent of India's total electricity consumption, and that share grows as urbanisation accelerates — India is expected to add 400 million urban residents by 2050 according to UN projections. Reducing demand through intelligent, heritage-sensitive retrofits is as strategically important as adding gigawatts of supply. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act 2022 empowers BEE to mandate energy performance standards for buildings; the next logical step is a national retrofit incentive programme that recognises adaptive reuse projects, similar to the UK's Heritage and Sustainability Fund. Every art deco building in Mumbai that is retrofitted rather than demolished is, in effect, a distributed clean energy asset — reducing grid load, cutting carbon, and preserving the urban fabric that makes Indian cities liveable.

Watch for Maharashtra's upcoming revision of its Development Control and Promotion Regulations (DCPR), expected in 2026, which is likely to include stronger incentives for heritage-listed building retrofits. IGBC's planned Green Heritage Buildings rating category — currently in pilot with select INTACH partners — could become the certification framework that finally connects India's conservation community with its green building industry. The YSG Redfern project is a small Sydney apartment. Its lessons for India are anything but small.