The Designer Behind Akshay Oberoi’s Twice-a-Month Karjat Home

Nishita Kamdar designed Akshay Oberoi’s Karjat farmhouse in locally sourced red brick, with an open courtyard his family uses about twice a month. Architectural Digest India published the house on 26 August 2026, the day his film Toxic opened in theatres.

Her first building, finished in 2017, was a Karjat farmhouse whose owners drove out from Mumbai on almost every weekend and milked their own cows. The new house sits in the same hills, with a lighter calendar and a magazine crew already in the rooms.

Local Red Brick, a Slope and Cows on the Grass

In AD India’s account, the house is terracotta, clad in brick taken from nearby, and capped by a dark charcoal roof that sits low on the walls. It is built partly on a slope, with broad-leaved trees around it and forested hills behind. Mottled cows graze on the land. A stream runs close enough that the magazine mentioned fireflies.

The brief Kamdar was given was short: rustic, intimate and warm. Visitors arrive through an open courtyard paved in flagstones, planted with shrubs and a frangipani tree, then reach a wooden door saved from a 200-year-old bungalow in Jaipur and reused here. Oberoi told the magazine the carving looked as if it had belonged to an old civilisation.

To me, it looks like something that belonged to an ancient civilisation once.

Akshay Oberoi, Architectural Digest India

The Times of India, rewriting that tour on 1 September, filled in the rooms. Shelves are taking books, puzzles and Oberoi’s vinyl. Lego sculptures made with his son Aviyaan are already part of the décor. The family wants walls of work by Indian artists later, so the house is being allowed to stay unfinished on purpose.

AD India posted the photographs the day the film opened. The brick, the door and the courtyard are the record of what is standing now.

https://www.instagram.com/archdigestindia/p/DcfuHwjEr_I/

Nishita Kamdar Has Been Working This Terrain Since 2016

Kamdar is the person whose name the celebrity tour treats as a credit line. She trained at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute in Mumbai, then interned in Mumbai and Switzerland before opening Studio Nishita Kamdar in November 2014. The Charles Correa Foundation’s roll of past winners lists her for the 2013 Charles Correa Gold Medal, given for a thesis titled Eyes of the Skin: A Recreational Centre for the Blind.

That student project was about how a building feels when sight is not the main sense. The Karjat houses that followed keep returning to breeze, shade, rain and the ground under the floor. In 2024, Architectural Digest India also published her own Mumbai flat, about 850 square feet, which she designed with her husband as both architect and client.

KAMDAR’S PATH TO THE OBEROI HOUSE

1. 2012: Completes her architecture degree at KRVIA in Mumbai.
2. 2013: Wins the Charles Correa Gold Medal for the blind recreation centre thesis.
3. November 2014: Opens Studio Nishita Kamdar in Mumbai.
4. 2016 to 2017: Designs and completes her first building, a Karjat farmhouse later called Under the Mango Tree.
5. November 2024: AD India publishes her own 850-square-foot Mumbai home.
6. 26 August 2026: AD India publishes Oberoi and Jyothi Vynatheya’s Karjat house.

Holiday homes are listed among the jobs her studio takes on, alongside city interiors and furniture through her label Pieces of Desire. Oberoi’s house is the first of those weekend jobs to ride a film that opened above Rs 100 crore. It is not her first attempt at Karjat.

A 100-Foot Roof Came First in These Hills

Condé Nast Traveller India went to that earlier house in 2022. Kamdar told the magazine it was her first architectural project, and that the client’s trust, while she was still a young architect, was exciting. Work started in 2016 on a 1.5-acre plot about two kilometres from the Ulhas River. The building took 5,500 square feet and was finished in 2017.

AD India’s 2019 visit described a 100-foot teak and steel canopy with insulation that kept the rooms about 5 degrees cooler than the air outside. Glass doors on steel frames could swing a full 90 degrees, so the house had no true front or back. The owners told Traveller they had never needed air conditioning, even in peak summer, because the plan behaved like a wind tunnel. They came from Mumbai for almost all their weekends, drank tea at sunrise, walked a path Kamdar laid around the lawns, and milked three cows.

TWO KARJAT HOUSES, SAME ARCHITECT

Kamdar described that first house as comforting rather than contemporary, with furniture kept low so the views stayed clear. The Oberoi brief uses different materials, brick and a salvaged door instead of a glass box, but the job is the same: a Mumbai family wants a pause in Karjat, and she has already built one version of that pause.

The Oberois Come Down About Twice a Month

Oberoi was born on 1 January 1985 in Morristown, New Jersey, studied theatre and economics at Johns Hopkins, and married Jyothi Vynatheya on 24 March 2011 after meeting her at Newark Academy. She has worked as a strategy consultant. They have a son, named Aviyaan in the home feature. He is a first cousin of actor Vivek Oberoi and has said, in a Times of India interview, that he went through about 1,000 auditions for roughly 30 jobs, and that without Jyothi he would have been without a home.

She is listed with him as the client. The twice-a-month rhythm is their brief, not a footnote. Rooms are being filled on those visits instead of being dressed in one go for the photographs. That is a slower way to finish a house, and it is also a way that keeps the magazine story open. Each trip can add a record, a puzzle or another Lego build, which is the opposite of the first Karjat clients, who used the building as a weekly farm.

Oberoi is, in the same write-up, an avid gardener with plans that need more than a weekend. Tilling, fruit trees and water systems do not run on 24 days a year unless someone else is on the land when the family is in Mumbai. AD India’s cows and stream are already there. The rest of the agrarian picture is still a wish list.

Why Karjat Instead of Alibaug?

Karjat sits about 60 km from Mumbai, cheaper per square foot than Alibaug, and still reads as farmland rather than a party coast. Oberoi’s house fits that belt. The bigger film names still buy on the water.

Shah Rukh Khan’s Deja Vu Farms, Salman Khan’s Panvel acreage, and coastal plots tied to Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Kriti Sanon, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma have kept Alibaug as the public address for a certain kind of success. Karjat’s pitch is different: hills, a rail line, and plots that still have room for animals.

A 2026 second-home comparison from advisory firm ORA put drive time from Mumbai at one to two hours for Karjat against about 1.5 to 2 hours for Alibaug via Atal Setu, and listed Karjat farmhouses at Rs 5,200 to Rs 8,500 a square foot, against Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000 in Alibaug. The same note claimed 12 to 20 percent-plus yearly gains in Karjat’s better pockets. Those are a seller’s figures, not a registry. They still explain why a working actor might take the inland road while the superstar belt stays on the beach.

KARJAT AGAINST THE COAST, 2026

• Distance: Karjat is about 60 to 75 km from Mumbai’s eastern side; Alibaug is about 95 km.
• Price band: ORA’s 2026 ranges put Karjat built-up farmhouses well below Alibaug’s premium band.
• What you buy: Karjat still sells as farmland, cows and a stream; Alibaug sells as a social address.
• Who is already there: AD India has been publishing Karjat weekend houses for years, including Kamdar’s 2017 job, a Studio Tab farmhouse in 2024, and this Oberoi tour.

Builders have started asking whether Karjat is the next Alibaug. For this family the draw is quieter than that slogan. They wanted cows on the grass and a door that looks older than the film industry, not a jetty and a guest list.

Jackfruit Trees and a Stream Bench Are Still Promises

The house that was photographed is a shell with a courtyard, a reused door and a start on the shelves. The land around it is the larger project, and most of it is still ahead of the family.

WHAT THEY SAY THEY WILL GROW

• Water: Rainwater harvesting and drip lines, so the plot is not left to the monsoon and the tanker.
• Trees: Mango and jackfruit, which take years before they crop, on land that is meant to be tilled.
• A seat: Oberoi said he would like a small bench beside the stream.
• The walls: Work by homegrown artists, added as the family finds it, rather than hung for the shoot.

Those plans sit next to a film that is paying for the attention. Toxic, directed by Geetu Mohandas and led by Yash, opened on 26 August 2026 at Rs 101.10 crore net in India, according to Sacnilk figures carried by Moneycontrol and India Today. By day five the worldwide gross was Rs 285.20 crore. A later Times of India day-six tally put the global haul over Rs 300 crore. Oberoi plays Tony in that cast. The Karjat house went public on the same calendar as the opening, which is why the tour arrived as a Toxic sidebar rather than as an architect’s project.

Kamdar already knows what a Karjat house looks like when the owners actually farm it, because she built that version first, with chai at sunrise and no air conditioning. This one is brick, a Jaipur door and a courtyard the Oberois can keep adding to, as long as someone is still there when the jackfruit needs water. “It would be nice to build a little bench to sit by the stream too,” Oberoi said. The bench is the honest scale of the place: a seat that is not up yet, on a plot they reach a couple of times a month.