House of Prasad
& the rooms we create
“I couldn’t believe I remembered it,” she told me. The house had been gone for years, but the rooms, and what they held, were still intact inside her.
Nisha is an Indian-American architect and educator, a woman who thinks in floor plans and feelings at the same time. Her work sits at the intersection of care and geometry: what it means to make a life inside four walls when you have known loss, migration, and being told “that’s not for girls like you.” The house she remembers most clearly is not the largest or the most beautiful, but the one where seven people tried to build a life inside a modest upstairs unit of a two-family home in Bayside, Queens.
Her story lives in rooms. The ones she grew up in, the ones she was locked out of, the ones she now designs for other people. This is the house of Prasad, and the rooms she continues to create.
Foyer
Before Nisha ever thought of herself as an architect, her life was already organized around thresholds. Her mother came to the United States from South India in the 1970s, in her late twenties, conservative, deeply Catholic, and fiercely practical. Her father followed later, an English professor in India who arrived in New York only to find that “nobody wants an Indian man with a thick accent teaching English here.” His career scattered into mortgage work and real estate, his sense of self bruised. Sadness and alcohol filled the gaps no one named.
On weekends, when he had open houses, he brought Nisha along because he didn’t have anyone else to watch her.
“I’d be there from nine to four in these empty houses,” she said. “People would come and go, and I would just wander, looking at everything, the trim, the light, how bright it was. I loved the emptiness. No one ever questioned why this random Indian kid was just roaming around.”
That foyer, the literal entryway of strangers’ homes, became her first classroom. She watched buyers crossing a threshold, imagining a life they didn’t yet have. She felt the quiet of rooms that weren’t lived in yet but were ready to receive someone’s story. Those days taught her something she didn’t have language for then: architecture is not just walls and square footage. It’s the feeling of stepping into possibility.
Living Room
In the upstairs flat where her family of seven lived, you climbed a set of stairs and landed in an open living-dining-eating area. The proportions were odd. The TV sat far away from the couch, with a stretch of “dead space” between them where the Christmas tree went every year.
Just off to the side of the living room was the window that Nisha calls “the sad window.”
“There was a foster house next door,” she said. “I would stand there and look out and watch the kids. It was always the Hispanic and Black foster kids getting beat. The white kids weren’t. It was crazy.”
The living room may be where we’re supposed to unwind. In Nisha’s childhood, it was also where she learned to see the world’s inequities framed, literally, like a show. She witnessed violence she couldn’t stop and patterns she couldn’t yet name, all from the safety of her own family’s upstairs unit.
Today, when she designs living rooms, she thinks about sightlines and what they hold. What do you see when you sit on the sofa, a TV, a window, a neighbor’s house? Do you feel exposed, surveilled, cocooned? The living room is never just a couch and a rug; it’s a stage where you learn, often very young, which stories are allowed to be comfortable.