Checking into Bandra

SOME STORIES OF hospitality begin with opulence. Marble lobbies. Imported linens. Perfumed foyers that smell faintly of money. Nishant Jadhwani’s Adore Homes begins elsewhere—in a Bandra flat he couldn’t afford, a terrace he moved onto to survive, and an idea that sprouted not from luxury but lack. Out of desperation, he discovered design. Out of scarcity, he invented abundance.

What Jadhwani has since created feels at once Bombay and beyond. His homes are not slick hotels but soulful experiments. They remind me of stylish experiments one might stumble into in Berlin, a loft in Brooklyn, a reclaimed ruin in Lisbon. But here they are, unapologetically in Bandra, with Bombay-boy swagger. This is not cosmopolitanism imported. It is home-grown hospitality stitched with equal parts grit and grace, salt-of-the-earth charm and sharp-edged chic.

The Brutalist Sea Pad is his ode to concrete minimalism—a Batman-esque bachelor pad where the walls brood in grey, the furniture sulks in silence, and the sea supplies the soundtrack. Not designed to soothe; designed to stir.

The India House, by contrast, plays on collective fantasy. A Carter Road bungalow transformed into a dream so many Indians secretly nurse: to own a sea-facing home in Mumbai, to jog at dawn and sip chai by dusk. Here, for a night or two, you don’t rent a bed, you borrow a dream.

Then comes the Shanti Villa, a misnomer at first glance. It began as a bureaucrat’s blunder, chopped into bathrooms and walls, claustrophobic as a cage. Jadhwani smashed through the clutter, painted in Southern hues, hung a swing like punctuation in the corner. After being conned by a furniture scam, he dragged in his own bed and sofa, turning loss into lesson. Out of wreckage, peace emerged—a parable in plaster.

And then, inevitably, the Bollywood Boho— Jadhwani’s nostalgia trip, lined with posters from Camera Gully, frames chosen with fever, and the hum of Catholic neighbours adding gossip to décor. The ceiling fell in on day three; the landlord demanded a 25 per cent hike; and yet the place persisted, like Bollywood itself— kitschy, chaotic, beloved.

These are not polished pearls. They are rough diamonds, jagged in places, gleaming in others. They are not sterile sanctuaries but lived-in laboratories of hospitality. They reveal something truer than perfection: that comfort and discomfort can co-exist, that beauty often arrives through cracks.

In wandering between them for a week, I discovered more of Bandra than in all my previous years of Mumbai. I first spent two as a student in South Bombay. Later, I lived two more at Worli, balanced on the city’s edge. And now, since June, I call Bandra home. Yet it was only through Adore Homes that the city properly introduced itself—through Catholic aunties who monitor your bedtime, joggers who wave without knowing why, shop keepers who remember your poster preferences. This is hospitality as human anthropology.

At the centre of it all is Nishant Jadhwani, once a Thane boy hawking deodorants and chocolates to keep pace with richer classmates, now a curator of homes that force us to see differently. He is not giving us escape. He is giving us exposure. To the neighbourhoods we overlook. To the divides we deny. To the fragile, beautiful, stubbornly precious lives that press against ours.

Adore Homes is not merely a business; it is a metaphor. For a city that thrives on juxtapositions. For a country learning to value both gloss and grit. For a world where we must recognise that the rooms we share—cracked ceiling, borrowed bed, gossiping neighbour and all—are more human than the palaces we build.

This is the pulse of the future of travel and hospitality. And it beats, fittingly, in Bandra. Check in for a night—but don’t be surprised if you find yourself checking in to Bandra itself.