Design Delhi: A Discerning Guide
- Aug 13
- 6 min read
Updated: 14 hours ago
If you're like us, you don't want endless information, and you're tired of AI-generated content that increasingly guides much culture writing. You want a discerning guide. Less is more. So we have written an unapologetically short guide to the very best of design in New Delhi. It is curated through lived experiences and academic research. Delhi is more than a city we love, it is our home, and it is the foundation for our designs and intellectual work and craft.
We are a mother-daughter creative practice, and we call Delhi our home. Sonya is an artist and designer, living in Delhi since the early 2000s. It is not just her home, but also the site of her creative practice and design studio. For a decade, she also ran an AirBnB welcoming fellow travellers to the city. Sarojini grew up in the city, and recently earned her doctorate in Urban Geography. Her doctoral project investigated and analysed Delhi's creative worlds.
We curated this list together, and the sites that we have chosen reflect our particular experiences and interests. We have included museums and galleries, heritage sites, architecture and buildings, as well as boutiques and stores. Some of these are sites you can walk past and see, others are places where you can enter into and enjoy an experience. This is a guide for those visiting Delhi for the first time, repeat visitors, and even those who live here.
Read on for the full guide of sites catalogued by category. Or if you just want the cheeky version, save the Google Map to your phone.
Delhi's Brutalist Architecture: A Self-Guided Tour
After independence in the late 1940s, Delhi's architecture shifted from colonial grandeur to something more utilitarian, as a young nation looked to raw concrete and bold geometric forms to build its new institutions. Brutalism became something of an unofficial house style for the decades that followed, and its blocky, weathered facades are now so woven into the everyday texture of the city that longtime residents barely register them, tucked between government offices and traffic circles rather than set apart as landmarks.
The National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) building (Kuldip Singh, 1978-80), nicknamed the "Pyjama Building" for its zig-zag bi-winged form, is a quintessential example, as is the nearby National Dairy Development Board (Achyut Kanvinde, 1985), whose stacked, cantilevered balconies and hanging greenery were designed to evoke the terraces of the ancient world. And the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) headquarters at Palika Kendra (Kuldip Singh, 1984), a cylindrical concrete tower rising over Connaught Place, remains one of the more polarising examples of the style, a building Delhiites tend to either love or dismiss outright, but rarely feel neutral about.
Not every landmark survived: the Hall of Nations (Raj Rewal, 1972), an enormous triangulated concrete space frame built in Pragati Maidan to mark twenty-five years of independence, was demolished overnight in 2017 despite international appeals to preserve it, a loss still mourned by architects and historians of the period.
Art Galleries and Museums
There is so much art in Delhi, in museums, galleries, and hidden streets and corners. A visit to the National Gallery of Modern Art, The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the art gallery, DAG, highlights the breadth of the city's art worlds. Beyond these, Vadehra Art Gallery anchors the Defence Colony gallery district, showing some of the country's most established modern and contemporary artists. While Latitude 28 worth seeking out in the same neighbourhood, focus on experimental practice. In Khirkee Village, Khoj International Arts Foundation runs residencies and shows that lean deliberately experimental, often responding to the neighbourhood itself, and Anant Art Gallery and the Asia Art Archive round out a scene that is as much about research and archiving as it is about exhibition. And beyond the galleries, the Lodhi Art District, opposite Meherchand Market, is always worth a walk.
Monuments and Heritage Sites
Particularly for those who have never visited the city, monuments and museums are an important way to learn more about the city's history, design and architecture.
Just south of Delhi is Mehrauli, where the twelfth century minaret, the Qutub Minar, stands. While the Qutub Minar is impressive by itself, the fifth century iron pillar in the same compound, has withstood the elements for 1600 years without rusting. The Jantar Mantar is another marvel, an eighteenth century open-air observatory of curved stone instruments built by the Rajput king Jai Singh II to track the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, still legible enough that you can read the time off its giant sundial. Not far from it, tucked down a quiet lane near Connaught Place (a ring of colonnaded Georgian-style buildings with global chain stores, vintage cinemas, bars and Indian restaurants), is Agrasen ki Baoli, a stepwell of over a hundred stairs descending into cool, shadowed stone.
The Humayun's Tomb Museum and Heritage Site is a red-sandstone tomb dedicated to Mughal Emperor Humayun, who died falling down the stairs of his library in 1556. As of the summer of 2024, a massive subterranean museum opened, developed and maintained by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). The museum is a treasure trove of art, architecture, astronomy, and literature.
There are other museums too that demand a visit. The National Museum is not what it once was, but still displays (at least for the moment) some truly impressive pieces. Among them: sacred relics of the Buddha, and a statue of the 4500 year old bronze statuette of a dancing girl. The National Crafts Museum and Hastkala Academy in Pragati Maidan keep the country's handloom and handicraft traditions alive (don't forget to stop by Cafe Lota, the outdoor cafe/restaurant housed in this space). If you have time, former Indian Prime minister Indira Gandhi's home (which is also where she was assassinated) is maintained as a museum, and provides a fascinating narrative of the cold war through 1970s Indian foreign relations.
Lutyen's Delhi: Design and Architecture
Named for Edward Lutyens (1869-1944), the British architect who laid it out in the early twentieth century, Lutyens' Delhi is a study in imperial grandeur. It is defined by wide avenues and colonnaded facades built to project the perceived might of British colonial power. At its centre stands India Gate, a forty-two metre sandstone war memorial commemorating the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War. Its lawns are a popular evening gathering spot for ice cream and kite flying. A short drive away, Connaught Place, the city's colonial-era commercial heart, radiates outward in concentric white colonnades, still one of Delhi's busiest shopping and dining hubs nearly a century after it was built. On Janpath, The Imperial Hotel has hosted everyone from Lord Mountbatten to the Dalai Lama since 1936, its Art Deco interiors and colonial-era art collection worth a visit for high-tea in the garden, even for those not staying the night. And tucked just off India Gate, Bikaner House, once the Delhi residence of the royal family of Bikaner, now functions as a cultural centre, its colonnaded courtyard regularly hosting art exhibitions, literary events, and theatre.
Where to Shop: Boutiques and Ateliers
Delhi rewards shoppers willing to look past the malls, in tiny shopfronts and family-run ateliers that have outlasted several generations of trends. Some of our most frequent stops include Vayu - Design for Living, which deals in considered home objects and furniture, and has the most gorgeous craft and culture exhibitions. Shades of India in Meherchand Market, is one of our favourite stores for contemporary textiles. Kashmir Loom works at the intersection of craft and contemporary design, reviving centuries-old Kashmiri pashmina and embroidery techniques. In Lajpat Nagar, KC Creations stocks bolts of fabric in every conceivable weave and print. I would recommend coming here if you are looking for fabric to tailor one of your own designs.For the bibliophiles, CMYK Bookstore and Midland Bookshop in Aurobindo Market offer two very different browsing experiences, one sleek and design-conscious, the other stacked floor to ceiling. Both are wonderful places to pick up books about art and design, and Delhi. And since this is our guide, and we are allowed to be cheeky, the final retail pin on our list is the Sonya Sapru Designs studio, one of Delhi's best kept design secrets.
This list is meant to serve two kinds of readers: those coming to Delhi for the first time and those who are familiar with its intricacies and contradictions. If you're new to the city, we'd suggest starting with the monuments and museums. It is the surest way in. If you already call Delhi home, consider instead a self-guided tour of its brutalist architecture. It was, for us, a way of looking at a place we call home again, and more closely, at buildings that we had long stopped seeing.
This is not an exhaustive list of design in Delhi. There is so much more to include. This is the first of many guides. Subsequent posts will look further into each of these categories in more detail. But this is, as we said earlier, a discerning and unapologetically short guide to what we consider to be the best of design in the capital
