Every city has that one bar - the one you don't need a reason to go to, the one that already feels like yours the first time you walk in. For Mumbai, Woodside Inn has always been that place. Cosy, dimly lit, unpretentious. The kind of warmth that can't be designed from scratch - it has to be earned.

Which made this brief both a privilege and a challenge. Bringing Woodside to Bandra meant honouring everything that made Colaba work - the staircase picked out in grey-blue, the wine rack glowing beneath it, the padded British pub bar front, the wood-panelled walls, the cantilevered bar tables that make you want to settle in and stay - while letting the new site be entirely itself.

And the Bandra site had strong opinions. The noise from the main road demanded an entrance vestibule - which became, in turn, a reception, a buffer, a light well, and the point from which the space unfolds in two directions: down into the pub, up into the dining room. On the ground floor, two large central columns became the anchor for two cantilevered wooden bar tables - the heart of the pub. A quiet nook carved out by the vestibule extension holds a green sofa and a lap table, and is exactly the kind of corner you'd choose for a date you actually care about.

Upstairs, the register shifts entirely. A vaulted ceiling draws the eye up and opens the space into something closer to a great Munich beer hall - generous, airy, flooded with light through large windows that make it work just as well at noon as at midnight. The white brick detailing nods to Woodside Andheri while keeping the warmth dialled up.

Lighting held the whole thing together. Dramatic where it needed to be, recessive everywhere else - designed to make the right things glow and let everything else fall into the kind of comfortable dimness that makes a bar feel like a refuge.

Familiar, but not a copy. Quintessentially Woodside, but unmistakably Bandra.