There is a difference between a material that photographs well and a material that lives well. The first wins on social media. The second wins in a home you actually inhabit. Most of the materials in our work fall into the second category — chosen not for the day they are installed, but for the year, the five years, the decade afterwards.
What follows is a short, honest tour of five materials that appear in nearly every Midtones project. Not because we are not adventurous — we try new things on every brief. But these particular materials reward the patience of looking at them for years.
01. Walnut
A wood that gets better with age. Most Indian residential interiors default to oak or teak — both excellent, both familiar. Walnut is darker, grainier, more honest about its origin. It looks like furniture rather than veneer, even when it is veneer.
We use walnut for cabinetry where the cabinetry is meant to be noticed — kitchen islands, bedroom headboards, library walls. We avoid it in spaces where the wood should disappear. Walnut wants to be looked at. Designing it into a room where it cannot breathe is unfair to the material.
A small note on finish: walnut should be oiled, not lacquered. The oil ages with the wood; the lacquer ages against it.
02. Lime plaster
If we could choose only one wall finish, this would be it. Lime plaster (or tadelakt, its hand-troweled cousin) is a finish humans have been using for thousands of years for good reason. It is breathable, slightly textured, slightly varied across a wall — the eye reads it as material, not as paint.
The colour palette of lime plaster is naturally restrained: warm whites, deep creams, dusty terracottas, mineral greys. None of them are loud. All of them flatter human skin tones in a way that emulsion paint, however expensive, does not.
The labour required is the catch. Lime plaster is a skilled-trade finish — finding the right artisan in Raipur takes time, and the per-square-foot cost is two to three times that of standard emulsion. We use it on the walls where it matters: the entrance, the primary bedroom, the principal living wall. Not everywhere.
03. Brass
The most misused material in current Indian residential interiors. Brass has become a shorthand for “premium” — used as hardware, as door handles, as trim, as accent strips. Most of it is the wrong brass.
The brass we like is aged — either naturally over years, or artificially finished with a satin patina at the workshop. The bright lacquered brass that arrives at most hardware shops is too yellow, too uniform, and ages badly because the lacquer chips and the brass underneath darkens unevenly.
A small piece of advice: ask the supplier whether the brass is solid or plated. Plated brass loses its finish within two years; solid brass develops a patina that improves the piece. The cost difference, on the small quantities most homes need, is genuinely small.
04. Terrazzo (Indian terrazzo, not Italian)
A material that has come back into fashion globally, which has made it briefly fashionable in Indian interiors too. The honest version of terrazzo — the kind used in old government buildings, schools, hospitals from the 1960s and 1970s — is one of the best floor finishes we have.
Indian terrazzo is cement-based, with stone aggregate, ground and polished on site. It is cheap (relatively), durable to the point of being indestructible, and ages beautifully — small chips and scuffs become part of the character rather than damage. It also stays cool underfoot in summer, which matters more than it should in Raipur.
The mistake most modern terrazzo specifications make is using too small an aggregate, too uniform a colour, and too high a polish. The result looks like an airport floor. The terrazzo we specify uses larger stone pieces (10–25mm), a mineral colour palette (warm grey, ochre, charcoal), and a honed finish rather than a polished one.
05. Terracotta
Both as a material and as a colour cue. Terracotta — fired clay, in all its forms — is one of the most under-used materials in contemporary Indian interiors, which is strange given how thoroughly it belongs here.
We use it as floor tiles in select rooms (entryways, kitchens, garden-facing verandas), as wall accents in baked unglazed tile, and as a single colour cue in upholstery, art, or small architectural details. The terracotta dot in the Midtones wordmark— the one that sits at the end of “Midtones.” — is a deliberate brand pointer to this preference.
Terracotta is a material that signals time. It looks like it has been here, and like it will continue to be here. Both signals are valuable in a discipline as susceptible to fashion as interior design currently is.
A small closing thought
This list is incomplete. There are five more we could write about — linen, cane, kota stone, hand-blown glass, mild steel with an oil patina. Materials are an ongoing conversation we have with the work. We expect this list to be longer in five years, and a couple of the entries above to have quietly faded out by then.
The discipline is not in picking the right materials. It is in being honest about why each one earns its place.
If you are starting a project and would like a thoughtful conversation about materials before any decisions get locked in, the studio is open. Begin a conversation →