Trading Opulent for Sleek in Pakistan, They Learned That Less Costs More

In Lahore, where the rich often build elaborate mansions, one couple spent extra time and money for simplicity

By Fred A.Bernstein

In Lahore, Pakistan, people with money tend to want tall houses. “Nobody builds a single story anymore,” says interior designer Fatima Salahuddin. They also want interiors with lots of marble. If you don’t use marble, Salahuddin observes, people will wonder where you spent your money.

But when Haroon and Ayesha Arshad, lifelong residents of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city with more than 13 million people, were planning their new house, “we weren’t concerned about social pressure,” Haroon says. “We live in a culture of opulence. We, as a couple, wanted to challenge that and build a space that reflected our personalities.

For Haroon, who runs a manufacturing conglomerate started by his grandfather in the 2960s, and Ayesha, whose family is in the textile business, that meant a modern house all on one floor, so they won’t have to leave it when they’re old. “We chose livability over a show of wealth,” says Haroon, 51, who, with his wife, has three daughters, ages 12 to 22.

But is anyone surprised that less costs more?

Haroon says that with the imported building systems needed to achieve the kind of precision he and his designers sought, the house cost three or four times as much as other luxury houses in their area- or about what it would have cost to build the same 12,000- square-foot house in Greenwich, Conn. or Beverly Hills, Calif. “Initially we thought we’d spent too much,” he says. But nearly a year after moving in, he says, “we know that it was worth it.”

The Arshads had been sharing a 40,000-square-foot house outside the city with members of Haroon’s extended family. When they decided to move closer to the centre of Lahore, they reached out to Salahuddin, who had helped them make their portion of the very big house livable.

Salahuddin had just graduated from San Francisco’s Academy of Art School of Interior Architecture & Design. There, she had befriended Tobi Adamolekun, a Nigerian-born designer who had been her professor and thesis adviser and is the founder of the California-based Tobi Adamolekun Design Agency (TADA).

Salahuddin brought Adamolekun into the conversation with the Arshads. The two designers began advising the couple on how to choose an architect in Pakistan. But Haroon so liked their ideas that he asked them to design the house. The two formed a partnership, which they called Omi-Pani, blending the Yoruba and Urdu words for water-in part because they like buildings that flow.

Soon, Salahuddin was helping the Arshads choose a site in Model Town, a residential community that was once a suburb but has now been absorbed into the sprawling city. Quiet streets and fences lined with frangipani, bougainvillea, and silver palm trees make it one of Lahore’s most expensive neighbourhoods, where an empty lot can cost millions of dollars. The Arshads bought three-quarters of an acre containing bits of an abandoned school and several old trees, including a magnificent fiddle leaf fig that they decided to try to preserve.

With Salahuddin in her native Pakistan, the two designers mostly met on Zoom. Adamolekun, who has a wife and son in San Francisco and is working on a ski development in South Lake Tahoe, made several trips to Lahore. Both say they set aside much of their other work for a chance to realize, Salahuddin says, “so much of what we believe about design.”

That included making sure every room had access to outdoors. But to achieve that and to make the plan of the house flow like water, they needed expanses of curved glass. They could have faked the arcs with flat panes set into closely spaced mullions, but the result would have been clunky. Haroon gave them permission to order curved, insulated, floor-to-ceiling windows from the German manufacturer Schaco. That was a “big ticket item,” Haroon says.

The building took the form of a U, with a large, landscaped courtyard and swimming pool at its centre. But for all its openness, the house is also very private. A brick wall surrounds the property. The house itself is ringed by a planted zone about five feet deep behind a screen of bamboo slats. That planted zone reaches deeper into the house in almost a dozen places, giving each room what is essentially its own small garden. A flat roof, typical of Modernist houses, supports an array of photovoltaic panels.

The entry sequence is dramatic. An awning of steel pipes cantilevers 25-feet from the front door, over a private driveway. The door itself is a sculpture, its outside sheathed in folded metal panels made in one of Haroon’s factories, its inside in grooved copper-clad panels made by Salahuddin’s family’s furniture company. A straight line leads from the front door to the central courtyard, its curved glass wall helping to guide people in one direction or the other.

To the left of the entry are Haroon’s study, where he entertains guests, and a larger sitting room. To the right is the dining room, where visitors and family members mingle, followed by more private spaces, including a kitchen and lounge just for the family. The prayer room, a mini-mosque, angles toward Mecca. In Pakistan, such rooms are often tucked away, but the Arshads wanted theirs to be at the heart of the house. “Religion is a big part of their lives,” says Salahuddin.

There is no marble to be seen. The floors are of textured Turkish tile. The designers purchased two sofas from Gubi and a chair from CB2. But most of the furniture was made in Lahore by Zamana Studio, the company that Salahuddin’s mother, Seema Iftikhar, founded 50 years ago.

Salahuddin now runs both the furniture company and her own design practice, which, she says, is busier than ever. Until recently, she says, interior design wasn’t taken seriously as a profession in Pakistan. But that has changed.

Some of the pieces were already in Zamana’s catalogue, and others were designed by Salahuddin and Adamolekun for this house. Those include the large dining table, its raw-steel base supporting layers of wood and MDF beneath a nearly indestructible finish. The Arshads splurged on lighting, including a chandelier by Paul Mathieu over the dining table and other high-end fixtures from abroad. But many light sources are hidden. “You see the light but you don’t know where it’s coming from,” Haroon notes.

Since moving to the new house late last year, Haroon and Ayesha have invited many friends and relatives over to see it. They were prepared for criticism, but, Haroon says, “People have reacted very positively to the flow of the interior spaces, the materials, the large windows opening onto gardens.” He adds, “I think people can see how beautifully our needs were understood and met.”

Culled from Wall Street Journal