Inside Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth's deeply storied first home in Chennai

People are different when they have forgotten they are being watched. I notice that in actors Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, as they move about their Chennai apartment—barefoot, unguarded, shuttling between rooms without ceremony. It is difficult, in such moments, to reconcile the people in front of you with the performers the world knows. Perhaps that is the intimacy of entering someone’s home—not that it tells you everything about them, but that it offers glimpses of the people they are when there is no audience.

The sit-out opens onto Chennai, where the city’s landmarks recede towards the sea on the horizon.

Their apartment is generous without feeling grand. Perched on the 18th floor, the almost 4,000-square-foot space is wrapped in balconies and enormous windows. Vistas stretch over the city skyline punctuated by familiar landmarks, while the sea marks the distant horizon. The view shifts with the weather, the hour and the light, and those changes are felt inside as well. Aditi likes to follow the sun through the day, watching it find its way from one room to another. She has grown up surrounded by beauty, with an instinct to live with it rather than simply look at it. She recalls her aunt saying, “Beautiful things are not meant to be kept in cupboards, they should be used.” For Siddharth, there is “throw”—a quality of spatial continuity that allows the apartment to be experienced almost as a single, extended composition. “This long throw is my favourite part of the house,” he claims.