By Suvir Saran
New Delhi [India], September 10 (ANI): Mumbai is eating five floors below Aditya Kilachand’s office.
At Rameshwaram Café, just below the old Bombay business building in Churchgate, people stand in patient, almost devotional queues for benne dosa and idli served on banana leaves. Butter melts into crisp dosa; conversation rises with the steam; the city pauses for something simple, familiar and delicious.
Five floors above, another kind of hunger is at work.
Young men and women sit around an open-plan office, laptops glowing, voices rising and falling, ideas being debated, refined, rejected and revived. They are designing, developing, imagining, planning and building. They are young enough to be impatient with yesterday and serious enough to be thinking about tomorrow.
At the centre of this movement is Aditya Kilachand.
To almost everyone around him, he is simply AD.
I first met him at a party hosted by his sister, Anandita De, the luxury lifestyle consultant. Her introduction was casual. My first impression was anything but.
I looked into his eyes and thought they could have been glass eyes, or perhaps some semi-precious or precious stone that had somehow acquired feeling. There was something unusually transparent about them: eyes that seemed to look through you, understand you and, strangely, put you at ease.
My first thought was that this man had been made to model some extraordinarily expensive bespoke clothing.
Then he smiled.
And the image changed.
What surprised me was the ease. The utter lack of ego. The selflessness. The warmth. Here was a man born into privilege who did not seem burdened by the need to perform it. He did not take his background, family history or lineage too seriously. He took his work seriously.
That distinction tells you quite a lot about AD.
I noticed something else that evening. Other people from his company had come to the party. They were not there merely because the boss was there.
They were there for AD.
That, to me, is one of the most revealing measures of a leader.
We speak endlessly about vision, strategy, growth and scale. But before any of those words matter, there is a simpler question: do people want to build with you?
The answer, around AD, appears to be yes.
Ask members of his team to describe him and a pattern emerges. Grounded. Thoughtful. Respectful. Supportive. Clear. Decisive. Empowering. Approachable. Gentle yet firm. Fair and reasonable when somebody gets something wrong.
One phrase particularly stayed with me: he makes you feel like you are building something with him.
That may be the secret of the culture he is creating.
Because the Churchgate office feels, in many ways, like a physical expression of the man.
When I first knew AD, the office was still in flux, on the second floor. Today it has moved to the fifth, where the space has been designed with an unusual lightness. The building itself is old Bombay—functional, familiar, almost anonymous when you enter. But step onto the fifth floor and the mood changes.
There is thought here.
There is intention.
There is air and light, flow and function, warmth and welcome.
It is open plan. AD’s office is larger than everyone else’s, naturally, but it is not flamboyant. It is circumspect. Appropriate. There is no theatrical throne room announcing the man at the top.
Ivory tones. Sheer, almost diaphanous curtains. Clean lines. Natural colours. Visibility.
People can see one another.
Nobody is hidden.
Nobody is put away.
Nobody appears to be hiding.
You hear voices—not the anxious silence of a workplace where everyone is afraid of the person at the top, but the happy hum of people in conversation. People dress casually, but not carelessly. There is comfort without sloppiness, thought without fuss.
You could almost be in somebody’s home.
And perhaps that is the point.
AD believes luxury should feel like ease.
Not excess. Not intimidation. Not an endless procession of marble, brass and grand gestures. Luxury, for him, is quiet. It should reveal itself in access, comfort, service, privacy, nature and time. And crucially, he believes that ease should extend all the way to the people serving you.
That is a very different understanding of luxury.
It is also at the heart of what he is attempting to build through Avās Wellness.
Avās has already established itself as a benchmark for contemporary luxury development in Alibaug. But the larger ambition is no longer simply residential. The company is moving towards an integrated lifestyle ecosystem in which real estate, hospitality, wellness, active living, recreation and community become parts of one proposition.
The house is only the beginning.
The club is what happens when the house acquires neighbours.
Wellness is what happens when the club begins to care about how those neighbours live.
Hospitality is what happens when an address becomes an experience.
And community is what happens when all of these things begin to belong to something larger than square footage.
The forthcoming Avās Wellness Club, expected by the end of 2026, is central to this evolution, bringing preventive wellness, fitness, recovery, beauty, nutrition and holistic wellbeing together. The planned Avās Racquet Club extends the idea into active living, sport, fitness, recovery and social connection.
It is an attempt to rethink the traditional Indian second home.
For decades, the second home meant a beautiful house that sat empty much of the week. AD appears to be asking a different question: what if the second home could become part of a living community?
What if ownership came with access to wellness, hospitality, recreation and friendship?
What if restoration became a destination rather than an occasional escape?
For AD, Alibaug is not merely a real-estate opportunity. It is a place of restoration. And that word matters.
Mumbai is velocity.
Alibaug is exhalation.
The future he imagines sits somewhere between the two: connected to the energy and ambition of the city, but offering the space to breathe that modern life increasingly denies us.
There is, too, a larger business intelligence beneath the beauty.
Avās Wellness is not being built around a single transaction. Its ambition is to create multiple points of engagement with its community—residences, clubs, hospitality, wellness, recreation and experiences. Each development contributes to a larger ecosystem and, in turn, strengthens the brand.
That is how a collection of properties can become something more powerful: a platform for living.
And perhaps that is why the people matter so much.
A company can acquire land. It can build beautiful structures. It can commission extraordinary architecture. But culture cannot be bought in quite the same way.
Culture is built slowly.
It lives in whether a junior employee feels heard. Whether disagreement is permitted. Whether mistakes are punished or understood. Whether talent is trusted. Whether people feel that their work belongs to them.
AD seems to understand that.
He notices things. What people wear. When their clothes change. Details others might miss. He dresses casually, but with thought. He plays golf. He loves to entertain. He enjoys a party. And somewhere behind the public ease is a private spiritual life: he prays, quietly and personally, in the old-fashioned Hindu way.
There is no contradiction in any of this.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
He can be deeply traditional without being trapped by tradition; modern without needing to reject inheritance; ambitious without making ambition feel aggressive.
He is relaxed, but he is a man on a mission.
That mission is increasingly clear: to build places in which people can live better.
And the word sustainable, when spoken around this vision, cannot merely be another polished word in a real-estate brochure. Sustainability has to be broader than materials, landscaping and marketing. It has to include the sustainability of the human being—the body, mind, relationships, environment and community.
Because the wellness of a resident cannot be entirely private.
If the community around you is healthier, happier, more connected and more fulfilled, your own life is enriched by it.
That is a quietly radical idea.
The old definition of luxury was often about separation: the bigger house, the higher wall, the more exclusive address.
The emerging definition may be about connection.
Better health.
Better food.
Better movement.
Better sleep.
Better nature.
Better neighbours.
Better service.
Better conversations.
More time.
More life.
Five floors below AD’s office, people are still waiting for their dosa.
Five floors above, a young team is working on something that will take considerably longer to cook.
They are building for an India whose aspirations are changing—an India that has travelled, experienced the world, accumulated wealth, but is increasingly asking what wealth is actually for.
AD’s answer seems to be: to create a life worth living inside.
And that may be what makes him, and the enterprise he is building, worth watching.
Not because he comes from a family with a remarkable history.
Not because he has access.
Not because he understands luxury.
But because he appears to understand something more difficult: what to do with all of it.
To take inheritance lightly, but responsibility seriously.
To create without clamour.
To lead without looming.
To give people room while knowing when to be firm.
To build not only buildings, but belonging.
There is something almost reassuring about seeing that kind of ambition in India today.
A new generation is inheriting enormous opportunity. The question is what it will make of it.
AD seems to have chosen to build.
And five floors above a dosa queue, in an airy, ivory, open office where nobody is hidden and everybody appears to have somewhere to go, somewhere to contribute and something to believe in, you can almost hear tomorrow taking shape.
Not loudly.
Not extravagantly.
Just deliberately.
Thoughtfully.
Intentionally.
And, perhaps most importantly, together. (ANI/Suvir Saran)
Disclaimer: Suvir Saran is a Masterchef, Author, Hospitality Consultant And Educator. The views expressed in this article are his own.
Five Floors Above the Dosa Queue: Aditya Kilachand and the making of a new Indian luxury
