In this Sea-facing Chennai Apartment, colour, clean lines and a curation of beautiful mementos happily coexist

Every year, Shoba Natarajan is lured back to her hometown of Chennai after spending a chunk of her time in the US, where she permanently resides. For someone who spends months together away from the country in which they were born, a hankering for familiar surroundings is perhaps only natural. So it wasn’t very long ago that Natarajan purchased a swish 3,700 sq ft apartment in a sea-facing gated community in the Tamil Nadu capital. Employing the skills of architects Rambha Seth and Sripriya Ganesan, co-founders of Studio Neon Attic, a young architecture and interior design studio based out of the city, she quickly handed over the reins to them to have her space ready to inhabit. That the architects received a warm shell with just the marble flooring and basic electrical points intact and turned it around in two months is to their credit.