Suzanne Roshan: The Interior Designer

Suzanne Roshan — wife of Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan — had by 2011 built a design firm, The Charcoal Project, that was establishing itself as a serious player in Mumbai's luxury interior design market rather than a celebrity hobby business with a famous name attached.

The distinction mattered in a sector where celebrity-adjacent ventures were common and serious professional work was less common. Suzanne had studied design formally and had been building her practice with the kind of methodical attention to the craft that the results needed to justify the overhead of running a proper design firm in one of the world's most expensive cities.

Her aesthetic was described by clients and observers in terms that were consistent with the "modern Indian" sensibility that was emerging in Mumbai's design culture more broadly: contemporary forms with Indian material culture embedded naturally rather than applied as themed decoration. The challenge was avoiding both the Western minimalism that didn't speak to Indian domestic life and the nostalgic traditionalism that didn't speak to contemporary aspirations.

The Charcoal Project's portfolio — photographed and featured in several architecture and design publications around this period — showed a command of residential scale, a comfort with natural materials, and an understanding of how Mumbai's particular domestic spaces (the apartment's need to function as home, office, and entertainment venue simultaneously) should be addressed.

Suzanne's professional identity as a designer was, at this point in 2011, successfully established on its own terms. That it would later need to be rebuilt through the turbulence of her highly public separation from Hrithik was something the design work itself hadn't anticipated.