Deepika AD Architectural Digest Scans Page 2

At Home With Deepika Padukone

For its inaugural issue, Architectural Digest's choice of cover girl Deepika Padukone perfectly fits the image of the magazine: Someone young, successful, elegant, aesthetically self-aware. An Indian, of course, with a global sensibility. And, of course ' a star.

The Copenhagen-born Bollywood actress is at the zenith of her career. She's self-motivated, hardworking and stately. She's neither fundamentally non-conformist, nor overtly traditional, and yet she is radical in having fashioned her career single-handedly. Everything about her'from the determined south Indian accent, to her ramrod-straight bearing'gives the impression that this is someone confident about who she is and what she likes. And in the style of successful New Age Indian professionals, Padukone is a recent homeowner.

Her home is the very essence of what it means to set up house today, when you can just as easily procure a Cassina armchair as you can colonial hardwood furniture. As the magazine demonstrates that Indian products and interior design today is at its best when it's a confluence of western and indigenous ideas and craft. The most successful home-grown brands have gotten that way by taking Indian motifs and translating them via international production standards. As her interior designer Vinita Chaitanya describes it, Padukone's home is "Deepika in a sari. Modern yet traditional."

Talking about the planning process of designing her home, she said, "I knew what I wanted and what I didn't want, I was constantly looking around'I would SMS Vinita in the middle of the night if I saw something I liked. AD was my research."