Dulquer Salmaan's Chennai house 'Azure,' is as layered as his filmography
Dulquer Salmaan has spent over a decade being hard to pin down on screen, the earnest romantic of ‘Ustad Hotel’, the restless outsider of ‘Charlie’, the morally slippery lead of ‘Kurup’, the genre-hopping star just as comfortable in a small-town Malayalam drama as a pan-India action spectacle.
In ‘Charlie’, his character famously says, "I don't want to be found. I want to be free" and there's something fitting about that line echoing through his Chennai home.
"Design, at its best, is a conversation you can walk through," says Amaal Salmaan, the architect and designer behind Ameerah Design Studio and Dulquer's wife.
Azure, the studio's debut project and the couple's own duplex, is proof of that idea taken to its most confident extreme, a home that never settles into a single mood, and is all the more cohesive for it.
You arrive first at the entrance gallery, where a monstera leans into frame beside a boat-shaped wooden vessel, cantilevered on a brass console like a trophy.
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Above it, a naïve-style painting of a hillside village sits under a cloud rendered in raised white dots. The cane-panelled wardrobes and rattan floor mats set the studio's material vocabulary early, natural fibre, warm timber, brass detailing.
That restraint dissolves the moment the double-height living room opens up.
A channel-tufted sofa in deep ribbed bouclé anchors the space, beneath soaring sheer curtains and a brass-and-glass chandelier suspended like a cluster of soap bubbles.
Against this hushed backdrop, the studio plants its loudest gestures, a faceted emerald console that reads like a cut gemstone lit from within, a psychedelic drip-painted panel in cobalt and violet, and a zebra-striped bolster chair that has no business sitting beside a faded Persian carpet and works anyway.
Directly opposite, a blossom-tree painting glows in deep pink against a charcoal frame, anchoring a console styled with brass candlesticks, stacked books, and a dried-floral arrangement.
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It's maximalism with an editor's hand, every bold object is given room to breathe.
Just beyond the living room, the apartment opens outward: a terrace in warm stone tile, ringed by travellers' palms, set for breakfast under an open sky with the Bay of Bengal flattening into the horizon.
It's the one space the designers didn't have to furnish with restraint, the view does that on its own.
Tucked away on the same floor is a corner built for slowing down. A mural of palms and hornbills covers one wall, a cream sofa piled with a chunky knit throw sits opposite, and a built-in wooden shelf holds miniature landmarks, books, and curios.
Just beyond it, the mood changes again. A den trades marble for warmth, wood-slatted ceiling wrapping the space like a cabin, low-slung bouclé sectional piled with cushions in rust, ochre, and ikat, and a caramel velvet armchair beside a woven straw tote. Above it all, a technicolour "blah blah blah" artwork winks at the room's unpretentious charm.
From here, the house circles back to function. The kitchen takes the opposite register of the living room entirely, smoked-oak cabinetry, book-matched marble flooring, and three emerald velvet stools that pick up the green thread two rooms away.
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If Azure has a room built purely for drama, it's the powder room, hand-painted crimson peacock wallpaper against iridescent mosaic tiles and an amber resin basin.
Upstairs, the bedrooms turn tactile and personal. Marble stairs with a brass-glass railing lead the way, past a rust velvet bench and colourful wall art.
Just off the top of the stairs is a pause between rooms, a glossy black Yamaha piano lined with blue-and-white ceramics, and a sage velvet sofa filled with tropical textile cushions. Above it hang three personalised frames, monogrammed D, M, and A, nod to Dulquer, Mariam, and Amaal.
The couple's bedroom looks straight out to the Bay of Bengal through floor-to-ceiling windows dressed in sheer and taupe drapery.
A channel-tufted headboard runs the width of the wall, while warm wood nightstands with brass legs and ceramic bird-motif lamps round out the space.
Attached is a bath that trades four walls for a view, freestanding tub, fluted marble walls, and a hand-painted floral mural softening the brass fittings and checkerboard rug.
Another bedroom leans formal, a crimson quilted coverlet against a leather-strapped headboard, with a jewel-toned botanical artwork doing the heavy lifting.
A third, built for daughter Mariam Ameerah Salman, softens into floral-embossed sage wallpaper, blush, and cream, with a knit throw and a doll house. A brass poster bed sits against a layered side table and floor lamp.
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Walk Azure end to end and what stays with you isn't any single flourish, the emerald cabinet, the drip-painted panel, the brass poster bed but how deliberately they're allowed to sit apart from one another, held together only by a shared confidence in material and proportion. It's a home that never asks to be reconciled. It already is.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: is it a coincidence that the actor who's never picked one genre, one language, or one kind of character lives in a house that refuses to pick one mood either or does Dulquer Salmaan simply surround himself, on screen and at home, with things that are allowed to be many things at once?