There is a moment, somewhere between check-in and the first night’s sleep, when a hotel stops being a building and becomes a feeling, one that a designer constructs deliberately, through the interplay of material, space, and light. At Radisson Resort & Spa Khopoli, light carries the most weight.
Khozema Chitalwala, founder and principal architect of Mumbai-based Designers Group, has spent over three decades making that case through built work. Founded in 1988 with the ambition of becoming an internationally acclaimed design firm, Designers Group found its directional focus in hospitality after working on Taj Hotels and Resorts. This breakthrough set the tone for everything that followed. Under Chitalwala’s leadership, the firm has since received the Luxury Hotel Designer award at the IHE Excellence Awards 2022 and recognition from the World Architecture Community Awards for Devi Ratn, Jaipur, an IHCL SeleQtions property. Today, the firm sits on the preferred designers’ list of most Indian and international hotel brands, with a portfolio spanning Vivanta by Taj, Radisson Blu, Novotel Resorts, and beyond. The firm’s design philosophy of achieving luxury and sophistication through simple yet elegant design runs consistently across that body of work.
At Radisson, that philosophy met a project with significant constraints. The building had already reached plinth level under a different architect and a different brand, originally signed as a Ramada before changing ownership mid-construction and upgrading to Radisson. The guest rooms were largely complete. Structural decisions had been made. What Chitalwala’s team inherited was a fixed skeleton. What they gave it was an emotional signature.
“Lighting to me is experience-specific,” Chitalwala says. “A space reveals its depth, texture, and emotion when lit thoughtfully.” The implication is quietly radical: if light is what makes a space feel like itself, then light is, in effect, the brand. “In hospitality, while brand language may guide materiality and spatial planning, lighting is what ultimately elevates the environment. It enhances the architecture, defines focal points, and allows guests to perceive the space in its most refined form. Light doesn’t just support a brand, it completes the story of the space.”
That story at Radisson begins with the sun. Large openings were oriented to maximise natural daylight, allowing the interiors to move continuously through the day, cool and diffuse in the morning, warm and directional by late afternoon. “We believe that even the most modest hospitality project deserves a well-thought-out lighting strategy,” Chitalwala says, which is why Designers Group brought in a specialist lighting consultant to develop the artificial scheme. “The idea is to create layers, balancing direct and indirect lighting, highlights and shadows, to allow the space to transform through the day and across moods.”
The scheme is precisely that. Soft cove lighting in guest rooms introduces intimacy and calm; feature lighting in dining areas creates focal points that anchor the space without announcing themselves. Shadow does as much work as illumination, defining texture, adding depth, and making materials legible. The local landscape photography used throughout the property, shot in black and white and rendered as wall art, only fully comes alive under this considered light.
The material palette was chosen in dialogue with this logic. Deliberately sober and urban rather than resort-y, it is refined enough to register the shift from morning to evening without tipping into the heavy or ornate. “It’s not about excess, but about precision,” says Chitalwala. “The right lighting can guide movement, create intimacy, and enhance comfort, making the guest experience memorable without being overtly noticeable.” A practical constraint reinforced these choices: when planned metal pergolas for the al fresco terrace had to be abandoned due to radiation interference from a nearby high-tension line, wood was substituted. The warmer, more tactile material responded better to light. A limitation produced a more considered answer.
Positioned between Mumbai and Lonavala, drawing families and weekend travellers for whom Imagica next door is the primary draw, Radisson needed to feel like a destination in its own right, distinct across different hours and different moods. The ability to feel different at breakfast than at dinner is not a secondary consideration here. It is what separates a stay from a stopover. At the property, that differentiation is built entirely from light.
