Hemant Sahni, Founder & CCO - In His Own Words
Hemant Sahni, Founder & Chief Creative Officer - In His Own Words
Breakfast in London, lunch in Helsinki, dinner in Stockholm. Those were the days once - short flights, long meetings, a blur of polite smiles. The deck landed, the deal closed, my phone vibrated with praise. Back at the hotel, that familiar scent of synthetic citrus tried to pass for comfort. I hung the suit, washed my face, and met the same quiet ache I’d been traveling with for years.
I had the résumé some respect and some envy: IIM Calcutta, fancy title, global remit. My profile hopped continents - USA for Growth, Europe for strategy, Africa for Programs - and yet the moments that stayed with me rarely came from boardrooms. They came from stolen minutes: a Helsinki café ‘Don Corleone’ for its unique theme and décor where light played with your mind; a woman in Cape Town selling a table lamp made of Ostrich Egg with light filtering through laser-cut patterns; a beautiful and rustic waterfront Moroccan restaurant in Johannesburg that offers you a blanket when the winter chill sets in; an Italian family arguing over pasta like it was a love language; an overwhelming experience of Art and Architecture in Rome.
And there were the big, cinematic memories - the kind that become golden threads in a golden cage.
I still remember standing on that stage, palms a little damp, as the late Sir Ratan Tata handed me an award. The room was thunderous; his presence calmer than the spotlight. For weeks after, the plaque sat on a shelf, watching - like a quiet reminder of the life I was supposed to continue living.
I still remember standing on that stage, palms a little damp, as the late Sir Ratan Tata handed me an award. The room was thunderous; his presence calmer than the spotlight. For weeks after, the plaque sat on a shelf, watching - like a quiet reminder of the life I was supposed to continue living.
There was the year I lived and worked from a beach in Florida - days set to the rhythm of tides and spreadsheets. Most mornings walking the shore to watch the sun muscle over the horizon (free regular masterclass in colour theory), days of calls, nights of salt air. If success were a postcard, it was that one.
In Cape Town, I drove Chapman's Peak Drive with white knuckles and an irrepressible grin - a cliff on one side, the Atlantic insisting on eternity on the other. It felt like travelling to the edge of a sentence that could end anywhere.
On a holiday in Mozambique, I slipped into the Indian Ocean and swam with dolphins - their silver arcs cutting the surface like commas in a sentence you never want to end. Underwater, sound turned to heartbeat and light to silk. I surfaced knowing I had just learned more about rhythm and flow than any theory could teach.
In Johannesburg, I jumped out of a plane. For a few seconds the fall was fear; then it became surrender; then quiet. And, then I wanted to keep flying forever, never wanting to come down. The ground rose like a promise. Later, in a hotel room, I wondered why that kind of clarity never visited me in the life.
Stockholm played on a quieter reel. I lived for over a year in the home of a young film director, folded into her small, fierce circle - midnight script readings, cigarette-smudged arguments about arc, edit, truth. They taught me that story isn’t what you pile on; it’s what you have the courage not to cut.
During the IPL in South Africa, I socialized with cricket legends, hosted them and did some crazy things together. I felt the stadium’s roar pass through bones like music.
Birmingham. A one-day international, blue skies pretending it was summer. I walked in with the tri-colour around my shoulders and walked out without a voice. The roar in my chest never quite matched the roar in the stands - especially one block that stunned me: Pakistani fans cheering for India like the scoreboard belonged to them, too. For a few hours, the game bent old lines - it felt like the subcontinent in one stand, playing their own epic in the old empire’s backyard.
India won. The adrenaline still hums when I think of it - strangers becoming a chorus, my throat staying behind in the stadium. And then Virat, pure Dilli, breaking into a little victory groove for the crowd - half swagger, half thank you. Days like that don’t fade; they stay up in memory, bright as a flag in the wind.
On another night, at a corporate celebration in California, I clinked glasses with a Jack Nicholson look-alike so uncanny it felt like a private joke the universe was playing. We laughed.
All of it - awards, cliffs, sky, scripts, stadiums, dolphins, the Florida dawn - made leaving harder. That’s the paradox no one tells you: the more beautiful the gilding, the heavier the cage.
Somewhere between baggage claims, an inner voice stopped whispering and started insisting: leave.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was patient, relentless. It showed up in my margins - chair legs sketched beside quarterly targets, notes about design observations next to revenue goals, a museum ticket stub pressed into a leather planner like a secret. At night I would lower the needle on Jagjit Singh, let the room crackle to life, and the thought would sit across from me, arms folded. I could choreograph a meeting to the last bullet; my own life refused to follow the script.
I enrolled in a design business school in London without actually leaving corporate. My calendar learned yoga - 4 a.m. video classes across time zones, 8 a.m. corporate meetings like nothing happened. By day, I defended margins; by night, I sketched them. I submitted assignments from airport lounges and built study models in the most unlikely corners.
The class had thirty students - twenty-nine women and me. The faculty never forgot my name. So, I had to stay absurdly alert, even with a full corporate day behind me.
You have work to do that you’re not doing.
After the London course, the restlessness got louder, I was still toggling between decks. The resignation letter sat in Drafts more than once, while my pulse debated my spine.
Leaving a machine you’re good at feels like treason. So, I did what corporate people do when they’re scared - I built spreadsheets to bargain with fear: savings versus risk, status versus sanity. One list was full of sensible reasons to stay. The other was shorter and heavier: build something that actually feeds you; be the father your daughter can point to and say, “He chose courage.”
Sometimes you don’t jump; you get nudged.
I was a well-oiled train - same tracks, more speed - until an external force did what physics promises. It didn’t arrive with drama: a handful of small things in the same week - a sentence I couldn’t unhear, a silence I couldn’t outtalk, a coincidence too neat to be random. The universe sent a calendar invite with no agenda, only: Change.
I stopped bargaining with the future, closed the spreadsheets in my head, and called that corporate life quits. I walked away from an eight-figure salary to earn a life that made sense. The reason matters less than what it made possible.
India called me home in a voice I could no longer ignore.
I went to Shekhawati and let the frescoes rearrange my priorities. In courtyards, Lime kept its cool under a cruel sun, alive in a way modern paints never are. Craftsmen showed me how to coax it like a living thing - slow, patient, respectful. We spoke of using lime now, not as nostalgia but as knowledge. I ended the days with dust in my hair, lime beneath my nails, and the corporate version of me feeling like a role I had played well and gently moved out.
I’d been trying for a while to find the bridge between food and design - why a home that nourishes should be designed differently from a home that just looks good. Permaculture finally gave me that missing connector, because it is, at its heart, a design science centred on food, land, water and how humans live with them.
Then I put my hands in the soil at Geeli Mitti in Pangot, near Nainital - the kind of place where the last mile has to be walked or taken on horseback, so you arrive unhurried. The International Permaculture Design Course looked like agriculture from afar but felt like philosophy up close: water before walls, wind before windows, site before structure. A kitchen isn’t just a room; it’s a living system. The shortest path from seed to plate isn’t romance - it’s good design. After that, I couldn’t imagine home design without food and music in it - the everyday life forces. Without them, it’s interiors. With them, it’s living.
Classes moved outdoors by topic. Some days the forest was the classroom: we carried a 60-inch screen down the trail, set it on grass beside a stream, river in our ears, contour lines on the screen, soil under our nails. Mornings were theory and slides; afternoons were muscle-hundreds of buckets of rocky soil to carve a terrace where scrub once held ground.
Then the alchemy: compost that steamed, mulch to keep roots cool, vermicompost and compost tea - natural fertilizers brewed from patience, not packets. Nights were more than twenty people and four dogs in a shared space, a communal kitchen cooking what was grown on the land.
One field session was a hard hill hike through the forest-six hours out and back. I returned bleeding in ten places and more satisfied than I had been in years. The land takes its fee; it pays in clarity.
Permaculture changes you in ways that are hard to explain and impossible to ignore. It rewires your defaults: catch water, feed soil, stack functions, share surplus. You begin to see houses as ecosystems and luxury as shade at noon and rain saved for later. I left Pangot with calluses and a new brief for life - and for Cocuzè: build systems that work so beautifully you forget they are working.
Cocuzè arrived like a name I already knew - cocoon: shelter, transformation.
The studio, at first, was just my dining table - sketches spread out, wood samples piled up, the faint smell of beeswax. That’s where the food - design - music triad finally clicked for me. I wrote a line across a page and circled it: Design is nourishment. Not a slogan - a pact. If a home didn’t help you breathe deeper, sleep better, cook slower, listen longer… then what was it really doing?
Work started finding me slowly - by patience and gravity. Friends, then friends of friends, became the first clients. We made small, stubborn choices: linen instead of synthetics, lime instead of plastic paint, brass and bronze that would age with the family instead of flashing for one season.
I leaned on a sourcing web I’d been weaving without knowing it: a woodcarver in Rajasthan who chisels like he’s writing scripture; a metal artisan in Uttar Pradesh who understands weight the way musicians understand pause; a restorer in Gujarat who loves old doors more than most people love new cars; furniture makers whose pieces rarely see Indian sunlight because everything they make is exported. Over time, that web thickened - and so did the work.
Food kept moving to the centre. I called that centre ‘Alimento - The Table’ the design for nourishment. Not a recipe archive. A way of arranging a life. Grow mint on a sill. Plate in brass that warms in your hands. Let the table be where arguments soften and stories begin. Design kitchens like chapels, courtyards like lungs. The house is a body; treat it with respect.
Design doesn’t live in a silo.
It listens to light and sketches for movement. It learns rhythm on a tennis court - timing, balance, recovery. It thinks ahead on a chessboard - many moves, not one. It keeps tempo in a room: a vinyl record teaches acoustics, warmth, and why analogue imperfection feels human.
It hears the pull of strings - a guitar tuned just right is the same as a room held in tension. It cooks slowly, in sequence and ritual - the table as stage, the meal as story. It reads to stay porous. It travels to stay in proportion. And it always lets nature co-design - following sun paths, wind corridors, soil, shade, water, time.
Many passions, yes. But one practice: designing for how life is actually lived. time.
It hasn’t all been poetry. Some nights were just spreadsheets and a silence you could count. Courage looks like romance from far away and like a bank balance up close. On the hardest days I’d drop the needle on a record, watch the light move across a wall, and remind myself: I chose this. The fear didn’t vanish - it just learned to walk beside me.
The Road Ahead
People ask for my philosophy. I wish I could hand them a room, but here is the closest I can get in words:
Let nature co-design. Use materials that tell the truth. Put objects in your home touched by a hand you can name. Invite music. Grow something you can eat. Allow quiet. Build for the person you’re becoming, not the person a magazine expects.
Cocuzè carries the velocity of the USA, the poise of Europe, the colour of Africa, and the ethos of India. It carries boardroom discipline and lime’s humility. It carries my daughter’s laughter and the hush of water from a small fountain that keeps a room honest.
Walk into my home and you’ll find a swing on the balcony - because play belongs in adult lives; a Dining Setup on the terrace - because winter light is medicine; Lladró figures that hold stillness like a note; Rajasthani furniture proving intricacy can be quiet; green that does more than decorate - it teaches patience; a turntable and, always, a table.
I used to measure success in a very conventional way.
Now I measure it by other things: basil ready to cut, lime cured just right, a client who writes to say they slept through the night for the first time in months.
If you’re looking for a house, there are many places to go. If you’re looking for a sanctuary, come sit for a while. We’ll make tea. We’ll talk about your life. We’ll design a home that remembers you back.
Boardrooms taught me how to carry an idea from one room to many. But here, scale is not an echo thinning in a hallway - it’s a river finding depth. At Cocuzè, growth will mean roots, not reach.
Homes that heal. Materials that tell the truth. Craft that outlasts weather and fashion.
We will move at the speed of your love - counted in returned footsteps, shared stories, rooms lived-in and remembered.
When you ask for more, we’ll open the circle gently: craft intact, makers honoured, philosophy unbroken.
And when that love crosses borders, we won’t launch - we’ll be invited. Until then, we build deeper, not louder.
We’re here to teach and to unforget: the quiet grammar of conscious luxury - fewer things, better made; hands over hype; biophilia and permaculture as daily practice; kitchens that nourish; rooms that breathe; food, art and music woven into the architecture of a life.
We’ve only just begun. A small studio by choice, a vast horizon by conviction. We will grow - carefully, beautifully - always with the soul at the centre.
Come be part of this.
Be a customer who uses our services and owns our products, be a supplier who acts like a true partner, a collaborator, an educator who shares wisdom, a stakeholder who helps build an ecosystem of makers, growers, and dreamers. Host a workshop. Co-create a limited edition. Add a recipe to Alimento - The Table. Plant a garden. Teach a skill. Learn one.
Cocuzè is more than a studio; it’s a movement toward living with intention.
The door is open. The kettle is on.
Bring your hands, your head, your heart. Ride with us.
From that foundation, we dream something bigger: to see India once again in the position of setting the tone for luxury and design, not following it. Design and luxury were born in India. For centuries this land knew how to build for heat, how to host with generosity, and how to create beauty that endured. Colonial disruption pushed that wisdom to the margins; we want it at the centre again.
So, every Cocuzè home, object and experience is a proof of concept: Indian design is calm, globally relevant, climate-intelligent and unmistakably ours. If we keep building with that conviction, India stops being seen as merely “artisanal supply” and starts being recognised as an origin of modern, conscious luxury.
That is the mission.