At Home with Maneet Chauhan

Maneet Chauhan loves a pop of color. When you watch her as a judge on Chopped, she’s often wearing vibrant hues and gilded accents — and she dresses her Nashville-area home in the same fashion. Each room has its own palette and always includes something shiny. The living room is cream and copper, the dining room is blue and silver, and the foyer connecting those rooms is teal and gold. Although Maneet is a natural at decorating, the 4,800-square-foot house was a challenge for the former New Yorker. She and her husband, Vivek, joke that “our bedroom is pretty much the size of our first apartment.” After the family (daughter Shagun is 5 and son Karma is 2) moved here in 2015, Maneet took about a year to cover the walls of their new home in textured papers and fill the rooms with beautiful objects she and Vivek collected from around the world. “I wanted a place that’s contemporary but with hints of our Indian heritage,” she says. “India is a land of color, and by putting these accents around the house we were able to incorporate a little of where we are from into our style.”

Maneet and Vivek fell in love with the living room’s soaring ceiling, but decorating all that wall space wasn’t easy. She started from the top with a pair of giant mirrors from Ashley Homestore, then filled the built-in shelves with colorful vases and metallic sculptures. She paired a formal but comfortable pewter velvet chair with a cream roll-arm sofa from Restoration Hardware.

Maneet had a clear vision for the dining room: “Versailles meets modern,” she says, laughing. She started with a powder blue damask wallpaper, then found tufted side chairs with a similar pattern. She offset the traditional look of the large Brazilian wood table with a more contemporary overdyed rug and a bright teal hutch.

The glass cabinet in the dining room is packed with pieces of family history, including 400-year-old etched silver handed down from Vivek’s relatives and some more recent acquisitions, like Maneet’s James Beard Award.

Vivek purchased the giant gold Buddha while working in Indonesia, and the couple found the perfect place for it — at the foot of the stairs — after it had been in storage for 10 years. It serves as the focal point in a room filled with gold, including metallic art and a console table Vivek spray-painted himself.