Ananya grew up in a joint family in Jaipur. Her grandmother's haveli was a masterpiece of accidental Vastu — rooms that were somehow always the right temperature, walls that caught the morning light as if by design, a puja room so still it made you stop moving.
"I didn't know it was Vastu. I just knew the house felt like something. Like it had been made with care for the people who would live in it. Most modern homes don't feel like that."
After studying design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and spending three years at a London design studio, Ananya returned to India in 2012 with one question she couldn't shake: why do Indian homes in glossy magazines look beautiful but feel empty?
The answer she arrived at was this: they had aesthetics without meaning. Pattern without intention. Beauty without roots.
"We had learned to copy the West very well. But we had stopped trusting ourselves — our own colour sense, our own spatial wisdom, our own 5,000-year tradition of designing spaces that hold people well."
Vastu Home Decor was founded in 2015 from a 200-square-foot studio in Lado Sarai, Delhi — with two custom-designed wallpaper prints, a hand-block-printer in Jaipur, and the conviction that Indian homes deserved décor that knew where it came from.
Ten years later, those two prints have grown into a collection of 340+ designs, stocked in luxury hotels, shipped to 28 countries, and — more than anything else — installed in 12,000+ private homes by people who simply wanted their house to feel more like themselves.