Ananya is a spatial designer and creative practitioner from Kerala, India, shaped by a cross-cultural upbringing and work experience across Iran, Dubai, and cities throughout India. With a background in architecture, interiors, and product design, her practice moves fluidly across disciplines, anchored in a curiosity for how people feel, move, and connect within space.
She earned her B.Arch from Manipal School of Architecture and Planning, where her final-year internships sparked a shift in focus from large-scale architecture to more intimate, human-centred environments. Her journey has since moved inward, from buildings to interiors to objects. Yet her approach remains rooted in one consistent idea: design as lived experience. She designs to elevate the everyday, creating spaces that allow people to pause, reflect, and feel.
Her work is layered with memory, material, and emotion. Often drawn to the forgotten or overlooked, she finds joy in reimagining the abandoned, giving it new life and offering it back to the world with meaning. This sensitivity also carries through the short videos she shares online that quietly reflect on time, texture, and atmosphere in the everyday.
At the Royal College of Art, Ananya used the freedom of the MA Interior Design programme to step far outside her comfort zone. Her final project, The Curiosity Club, asked a simple but urgent question: Are we designing curiosity away? It reimagines the top floors of a corporate office in Canary Wharf as a multi-generational playscape; a space not for instruction, but for exploration, where bold colour, abstraction, and movement come together in a kind of joyful resistance to rigidity. The RCA became a space of unlearning and intuitive rediscovery, where she embraced a design language unlike anything she had worked with before, guided more by instinct than convention.
Ananya sees herself as a collector of fragments – ideas, materials, gestures – carefully layered over time through mentors, cities, and memories. And that process of layering, unlayering, and layering again is one she hopes will continue for a long time to come.