Why every home should have one un-photographable room.

The room a client cannot photograph is often the room they live in most.

There is a room in Mahesh's home in Kukatpally that has never been photographed. It is a small study with two mismatched chairs, a desk with a permanent stack of drawings, a bookshelf with more books on the floor than on the shelves, and a window that faces a neighbour's compound wall.

It is the room he sits in for four hours every evening. It is his favourite room in his own home. He would never share a photograph of it.

What un-photographable means

An un-photographable room is a room that does not perform. It does not stage well. It does not compose. The angles are ordinary. The light is uneven. The objects on the surfaces are the objects that were used yesterday and set down without ceremony.

It is a room designed for the person inside it, not the person outside it.

Why every home needs one

Because a home entirely optimised for photography — for the visitor, for the guest, for the Instagram grid — becomes, over time, a set. And a set is exhausting to live in.

The un-photographable room is the release valve. It is where the family leaves the day's clutter. It is where the child does homework with three erasers on the desk. It is where the adult reads a book in a chair that is comfortable rather than sculptural.

We have designed sixty-three homes. In each of them, we have tried — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to defend one un-photographable room. Usually the study. Occasionally the guest bedroom. Sometimes the informal dining nook next to the kitchen.

These rooms are almost never in the client's brief. The brief always describes the photographable rooms. We add the un-photographable one quietly, and defend it against the client's later requests to _clean it up._

How to design one

Do not curate the shelves. The books go on the shelves as the family reads them. Not by colour, not by size. In the actual sequence of use.

Allow the desk to hold what it holds. A permanent lamp, a permanent notebook, a permanent pen. The rest of the surface belongs to whoever sat down last.

Use one comfortable chair, not a matched pair. The mismatch is the room's honesty.

Position it away from the main circulation. An un-photographable room needs privacy from guests. It should be at the end of a corridor, or up a half-flight, or behind a door.

The un-photographable room is the room the family sends photographs of, eight years later. Not the marble bathroom. Not the living room with the bespoke ceiling.

What we have learned

We are learning to design for that photograph.

— Suneeth