Design Is No Longer a Cost Centre: It’s a Differentiator
By Dr. Gautam Kanodia, Founder of KREEVA, Kanodia Group
Across several urban markets now, especially in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Pune and parts of Hyderabad, one notices that buyers are reacting to spatial quality much earlier in the decision cycle. Not just façade treatment or imported marble language, but the way homes actually function. Natural light inside apartments. The width of balconies. Even corridor experience, something developers rarely discussed a decade ago, has started entering buyer conversations in a surprisingly direct way.
The pandemic accelerated this awareness, but the shift seems deeper than a temporary behavioural adjustment. People spent enough time inside their homes to begin noticing design failures they had previously tolerated.
Oversized inventory packed into dense layouts suddenly felt restrictive once homes started functioning simultaneously as offices, classrooms, gyms and living spaces. The market responded in stages. First, through cosmetic language, larger decks, wellness branding, and biophilic vocabulary. Then gradually, through more structural design decisions.
One can see that evolution in the premium and luxury segments is quite clear. According to ANAROCK’s Indian Residential Market Annual Update 2024, the new supply of homes priced above Rs. 2.5 crore rose by 66% across the top seven cities in 2024 compared to the previous year. At the same time, JLL Research noted that luxury housing accounted for 62% of residential sales share in major metro markets during H1 2025, up from 51% a year earlier. Those numbers are often read purely as indicators of wealth concentration. They are also signalling something else: buyers are increasingly willing to pay for differentiation they can physically experience.
And design has become one of the clearest forms of that differentiation.
Not always visibly. Sometimes the premium emerges from what is absent rather than what is added. Less cluttered circulation. Fewer units per core. More usable corners instead of decorative ones. In some newer projects, there is noticeable restraint in planning, developers sacrificing saleable density in favour of perceived spaciousness, which would have sounded financially irrational during earlier market cycles.
Knight Frank India, in its H1 2024 market assessment, observed relatively healthy inventory movement in premium housing categories. Buyers today appear more selective, but once conviction is established, absorption tends to be sharper. This is also why global design collaborations have become more common, though not always for the reasons publicly stated. International architects, landscape consultants and hospitality-linked planners are not only contributing aesthetics. They are lending signalling power. In effect, design credibility itself has become monetisable.
Interestingly, the conversation inside the industry has also changed. Earlier, design discussions were frequently framed around efficiency ratios and loading optimisation. Those concerns remain, obviously, but many developers now speak internally about “experience retention”, whether the project will continue feeling relevant five or seven years after possession. That was not a common framing earlier.
There is another layer here that the market still does not discuss enough: maintenance economics.
Some of the more thoughtful residential developments being launched today are not necessarily the most visually extravagant ones. They are the projects where material choices, energy behaviour and operational sustainability are being integrated early into planning. Better ventilation reduces dependence on cooling systems. Smarter common-area planning lowers maintenance pressure later. Durable materials reduce lifecycle fatigue. These decisions rarely dominate advertisements, yet increasingly influence resale strength and resident satisfaction over time.
But buyers have become harder to convince through surface treatment alone. That may be the larger story unfolding underneath the premiumisation narrative. Indian residential real estate is slowly moving away from a phase where scale itself guarantees market legitimacy. In several micro-markets now, the sharper distinction is increasingly between projects that feel considered and projects that feel assembled.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily of Realty&More.
