The interior design trend taking over our homes today? Wall murals

In 2012, the quiet lanes of Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood woke up to a delightful aberration. Sizeable swathes of building facades on Chapel Road and Pereira Road were painted over with 25ft-tall likenesses of Madhubala, Amitabh Bachchan, Dev Anand, and Rajesh Khanna. The Bollywood Art Project, brainchild of graphic designer Ranjit Dahiya, brought a unique brand of insolence and charisma to the bylanes of the neighbourhood, where the pop-art visages of Bollywood’s most legendary icons would stare down at passers-by. In turn, the passers-by, no matter how briskly they had been walking or how pressing their commitments ahead, couldn’t help but stop dead in their tracks to stare back.

It’s not that India was unacquainted with wall murals till then. Who are we kidding—we have some of the best examples of wall art in the world: the Jain cave paintings; Ajanta and Ellora; the folk-religious miniatures of Shekhawati havelis in Rajasthan; the Chola temple murals of Tamil Nadu; the intricate wall paintings in Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayan belt...these are just a few of the examples.

However, in a game-changing leap, murals have now breached the barrier between the public and the private. Maybe it’s because of the out-of-the-box influence that TikTok and Pinterest have had on interior design, but designers and home-owners alike have realised walls no longer need to play a supporting role for framed paintings or photographs. As leads in a home and office, they offer a blank canvas, and an expansive one at that. You can have art on your ceiling, on a pillar, on the floor, in your bathroom, on all four walls—any surface that can hold paint or glue, really. In a duplex, a mural can help unfold stories from one floor to another, along the walls of the connecting stairway. There is nothing to inhibit what can and cannot be done with a mural.

“It’s the versatility, really,” says designer Saniya Kantawala while speculating on the growing appeal of the medium. Having commissioned several murals for her projects, Kantawala, who has just finished mounting a ‘wall of embroidery’ in a fashion designer’s home in Mumbai, speaks from experience. “Wall murals can be the story of your family, a reminder of a vacation, your favourite quotes, symbolism from a cherished memory, anything at all. They can beautifully connect a space with the objects around it and its very ethos.”

Still, it takes skill to coax a blank wall to speak, and the circle of wall muralists in the country remains niche. One such wall whisperer is Priyanka Thaker, an Ahmedabad-based artist and architect, who is championed in earnest by architects and designers such as MuseLAB, Baldiwala Edge, Studio Nishita Kamdar, R+R Architects, and Purple Backyard, to name a few.

Most recently, for the pre-wedding celebrations of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in March, Thaker created 164 murals for hotel rooms in Jamnagar. The frighteningly prestigious assignment was also a logistical challenge—she had just 10 days to wrap it up from start to finish. Thaker conceptualised the designs and contracted with 40 painters to complete 18 rooms each day. “I taught some of them to paint on site,” she recalls. Such sangfroid when caught in a pickle explains why, in just five years since she opened her art and architecture practice, House of Berserk, Thaker is already among India’s top-billed muralists. When we speak, she is on her way to sign yet another NDA with a high-profile client. “If this goes ahead, this one’s also going to be big, very big,” she teases.

Despite having 400 wall murals to her credit, and a client roster most artists could only dream of, Thaker confesses that she still feels nervous when she starts a new project. “I prefer not to call myself an artist because I do not work with a singular language or concept and make it my life,” she adds. It helps that she fiercely guards a bold streak of eccentricity (“paints are my passion and poison”) that buoys her through back-breaking days.

In a medium characterised by immensity, Thaker’s style brings the added edge of maximalism, sometimes flirting moodily with psychedelia. Her Instagram page is a window into her oeuvre: a 40ft mural in Coimbatore, made in collaboration with St+art India, which speaks through humanised trees of the many symbiotic relationships that exist in the ecosystem; a rendition of Picasso’s anti-war painting ‘Guernica’ dominating the living room of a private residence in Ahmedabad; a ceiling full of intense black-and-white abstractions for a family of art enthusiasts in Mumbai; terracotta-smeared walls with a white overlay of Krishna Leela themes brought forth in complex artistic styles of Gond, Patachitra, Warli, and Pichwai for a sari store.

“It may seem restrictive to collaborate with designers and architects, because they come with a vision already in place, so one may have to follow a colour palette or theme. But the sheer challenge of being put in that box and working within it makes it more exciting for me and pushes me harder,” says Thaker. She is also fastidious about specifying in great detail as to what kind of surface she wants and the kind of surface preparation she expects beforehand. “After the first recce, we inform the client about the potential threats that could deteriorate their wall and discuss the number of layers that can be added. Sometimes, we reject doing wall murals, and suggest an alternative like an installation instead. Because even if the installation needs repair, it can be detached, repaired, and put back.”

When she works with clients directly, she spends long hours in conversation with them, understanding how they look at life and what drives them. She is deeply intentional about creating something that makes people feel like they belong to it—just as it belongs to them. “Over the course of a project, you realise that you are telling someone else’s tale. I have to set aside my inhibitions, my judgements, and my outlook, and try to give something to my client that reflects their past, their present, and where they are headed. Sometimes I worry if I am trying to give them something that is not relevant or that they are not going to be able to relate to. Because the past and the present are still very factual, but the future is the vast unknown.”

All in all, Thaker’s practice is one of deep introspection and hard work, and she is known to approach every project with steely discipline and rigour. In March, at the beginning of an unbearable summer, she spent three weeks working on a wall mural for the facade of an eight-storied hospital in Ahmedabad. “We were working freehand and the heat was hellish. We then decided to pull night shifts, starting at 5 pm and working till 8 am.” She loves it all, though, and has made it a practice to note her gratitude. “I am in the habit of sending WhatsApp voice messages to myself. The other day I stepped out while working on a site, and saw this man feeding a dog. The serenity of that moment hit me hard. I wondered if I am doing enough and if any of it is this beautiful. I spoke my thoughts into my phone. So on tough days, I am reminded that there is this moment that I witnessed. There is beauty in this world.” It takes the soul of an artist to comprehend the magnificence stashed inside a small moment. And while Thaker may vociferously disagree, she is an artist through and through.