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.

Kitchen

The kitchen in that upstairs house sat right in the center, the heart of the layout. Two full-height walls enclosed it, with an island opening back to the living and dining area. Nisha remembers standing at the kitchen window as a child, the one that faced that same foster home, watching and absorbing.

But what she remembers most vividly is her mother.

“If you looked through the opening from the living room into the kitchen, you’d always just see the back of her neck,” Nisha said. “She was always cooking.”

Her mother worked double shifts as a nurse, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at two different hospitals. Sometimes, when Nisha was sick, she would sleep with the brother who is now a doctor. Other nights, she floated from bed to bed: her sister and brother’s shared queen bed, the bottom bunk, the top bunk, her parents’ room. There was no bedroom of her own, just a rotating arrangement of shared bedframes and caring siblings.

In the middle of that controlled chaos, the kitchen stayed ordered and alive. Seven people, almost no clutter. “We never had excess,” Nisha said. “The only thing we had too much of was encyclopedias. Every two years she’d buy a new set. For seven people, there was never mess.”

Her mother propagated plants everywhere. Monstera’s, pothos, bits of green trailing up and over the island, nailed into the wall so they could climb. Decades later, in Nisha’s own North Carolina home, her partner did the same thing: trained plants to climb over their island.

“I realized I had recreated it,” she said. “Wherever my mom was, there was green.”

Now, in kitchen renovations, Nisha gravitates toward central islands, light that shifts throughout the day, plants that move like a second architecture. She thinks about the ergonomics of care: how far the sink is from the stove, where a child might stand to watch a parent cook, where a plate of cut mango could be set down at 2 a.m. for a daughter pulling an all-nighter at the table.

Hallway

Between the kitchen and the bedrooms ran a hallway that Nisha, as a child, believed was endless.

“I remember this hallway felt like the longest hallway of my life,” she said. “Now I realize it wasn’t.”

Next to the kitchen, a bathroom that five siblings shared. At the end, two bedrooms, a balcony off her parents’ room. At times, the family would find themselves locked out of the house and her brothers would climb the balcony column to reenter.

Hallways are often treated as wasted space in American design, something to shrink, eliminate, or turn into a gallery of family photos. For Nisha, that stretch of floor between kitchen and bedroom was an endless stream of lava that needed 4 pillows to cross over.

What felt endless at seven becomes compact at thirty-seven. Design lives in that shift in perception: how we remember distance versus what it actually was.

Bedroom

In that first house, there were two bedrooms for five kids. Nisha’s sister and one brother shared a queen bed in their room; the two older brothers had a bunk bed and a long desk lined with encyclopedias. Nisha, the youngest of five, didn’t have a bedroom.

“I would go from bed to bed to bed,” she said. “Every night someone took turns having me sleep with them. It felt normal and fun to me. I never thought to ask for a cot.”

Her understanding of what she was “allowed” to want had already been shaped by culture and scarcity. When she told her father in eighth or ninth grade that she wanted to be an architect, he told her architecture was “no place for an Indian girl.” Her sister, who wanted to be a lawyer, got the same answer and was pushed into medicine instead.

Her brother, an engineering student, told her it would be too hard for her. “And he was the cool brother, so it hurt.” she said.

So she did what many daughters of immigrants learn to do: she obeyed on the surface and rebelled in the margins. She enrolled in New York Institute of Technology as a biology major, took on loans in her own name, and secretly registered for architecture classes. She overloaded her schedule, carrying an impossible number of credits, and eventually abandoned the pre-med route to officially switch to architecture.

By then, the family had moved to a Cape Cod-style “house-house” in Garden City Park, in Long Island. Nisha didn’t have her own room there at first either, not until her siblings left for college and her father died when she was fourteen.

“It ended up just being me and my mom in the house,” she said. “I finally had rooms to choose from, but it was because loss had emptied them.”

When Nisha designs bedrooms now, she thinks about more than storage and bedside sconces. She thinks about the claim a child gets to lay on space, or doesn’t. Who is allowed a door they can close? Who wanders, quietly grateful for whatever corner of a bed they are offered?

Dining Room

In the second house, a poorly insulated sunroom had been converted into a dining room by the previous owners. It was freezing in winter, barely used except for big gatherings.

When Nisha started architecture school, her mother quietly let her take it over.

“I’d be in there in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, gluing models together,” she said. “My mom didn’t understand what I was doing, but she was proud. She’d wake up at two in the morning, and suddenly there’d be cut mango and hot chai next to me. Then she’d go back to bed.”

The dining room is supposed to be about eating and hosting, but here it became a studio, a liminal workspace where Nisha’s future took shape under a single hard light. Her mother, who had once pushed her away from architecture out of fear and tradition, shifted into a quiet supporter who made space, literally, for the mess, the foam core, the X-Acto knives.

It’s a pattern Nisha sees in so many of the homes she works on now. The “formal” dining room that sits pristine and unused, full of inherited furniture no one wants to touch, while real life happens around the kitchen island or on the floor of a playroom. She is more interested in how a family actually lives than in what a room is labeled.

Basement

Some stories live in the rooms you never see on a floor plan.

Her father’s alcoholism was like that, acknowledged in fragments but never named outright. “No one would call him an alcoholic,” Nisha said. “But he was. He’d drink for four months, then be sober for a long time, then drink again.”

*(Nisha does recount with fondness that her father was sober during the Christmas season, and that was her favorite time of the year.)

So was her queerness. Throughout architecture school and grad school, Nisha had a girlfriend. She never came out to her mother.

“My therapist, who was also queer, told me, ‘You are not less out because you choose to protect what’s left of your mother’s mind, if you have to live in a world where you just preserve what’s left of your mother’s mind, then just live that way. There’s no shame in that and don’t feel guilty.” Nisha said.

When her mother died on December 30th, Nisha’s belief in anything good collapsed. “I stopped believing in Jesus, in heaven, in all of it,” she said. “I was so angry.”

Her therapist told her that her cynicism would be temporary, that one day she’d believe in goodness again, in reunion, in something beyond this. Nisha didn’t believe her. And then, three or four months later, the therapist died, and Nisha went to her funeral.

“I remember sitting there and suddenly thinking, ‘Okay. I believe in heaven again,’” she said. “Because if there is no more after this, then I never get to see my mom. And that’s unbearable.”

The basement and attic are where we tuck away the things we can’t look at every day: old beliefs, complicated parents, the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the script our community wrote for us. Nisha’s work is shaped by that knowing. She has learned how to hold complexity, tradition and rebellion, faith and doubt, cruelty and tenderness, without needing to rearrange it into something tidy.

Guest Room

By twenty-three, Nisha had a bachelor’s in architecture, a master’s from Columbia in architecture and urban design, and a phone call from an old thesis professor who had become chair of her undergrad program.

“He called me and said, ‘I need you to come teach a class for me,’” she said. “I was twenty-three. The students were my age or older. I had a panic attack before my first class. I hated it at first.”

She kept going. She taught technical classes, 3D modeling, rendering, then studio courses, the heart of architectural education. When she moved to North Carolina nine years ago, UNCG’s department chair asked her to teach a fourth-year studio. She said yes again.

“I never thought I’d want to be a teacher,” she said. “Now I look back and think, oh my god I was meant to be a teacher.” Nisha’s father was a teacher. Her grandfather was a headmaster. It was in the family all along, really.

Teaching is a kind of guest room, you open a space that isn’t quite yours and isn’t quite theirs, but is made for them to grow in. You prepare it. You hold it. You watch people move in and then move on.

Nisha is also stepping into another kind of public room: starting in January, she’ll become president of the Winston-Salem chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She’s already been cold-calling local firms, pushing them to submit work for design awards, trying to wake up a sleepy scene.

“We actually got more firms to submit this year than any year before,” she said. She’s been nominated for a Young Architect Award and an Educator Award*, both recognitions that point to the dual nature of her practice: building spaces and building people.

*By the time of this publication, Nisha was in fact awarded Young Architect of the Year and Educator of the Year by the AIA North Carolina-both awards she dedicated to her parents.

The Rooms We Create Now

Lately, Nisha has been leaning into smaller projects but will take on anything that feeds her soul.

“I’d rather do four small projects that actually transform people’s lives than one big project that just inflates someone’s ego,” she said. “In Europe, in Latin America, in India, the proportions are modest. They design with climate and community in mind. Here, it can feel like it’s excess for nothing.”

She designs with Indian efficiency, remembering monsoon houses with tile floors that hold the cool, walls that release stored heat at night, small slits at the top of walls that let hot air escape. She carries patterns, colors, and climate knowledge from South India into Southern American houses, even when it shows up in subtle ways: a breeze block wall, a shaded courtyard, a splash of vibrant tile.

And always, there is green. Vines trained to travel over an island. Plants in corners where clutter could have been. Light hitting walls in ways that feel familiar, like the back of a mother’s neck, like a childhood house that no longer exists but still stands inside you.

When her siblings visit from New York and walk with her through Reynolda Gardens, they laugh and say, “You’re giving mummy right now,” as she stops them by the roses to take a photo. On a beach vacation, when she unpacks a cooler full of crostini, meats, and banana bread to avoid resort prices, her sister says it again: “You are mummy right now.”

We inherit rooms even when they’re gone. We carry their proportions, their rules, their ghosts. We recreate what hurt us and what held us, and, if we’re paying attention, we edit.

Loss doesn’t empty a room; it stretches it. Grief is not something you outgrow; it’s something you grow around. The architecture of a life doesn’t erase what was there before, it builds alongside it.

In the house she lives in now, so similar in layout to the one she grew up in, Nisha is continually rewriting those rooms. There is no sad window facing a foster home, but there is awareness. There is no little girl without a bed of her own, but there is a designer who remembers what that felt like. In every project she takes on, from a humble kitchen renovation to a full-scale home or business, she is asking the same question:

What kind of room will this be in someone’s memory?

In the house of Prasad, the answer is never just square footage. It is mango slices at 2 a.m., an encyclopedia-lined desk, a hallway that shrinks as you grow, a dining room turned studio, a guest room that becomes a classroom. It is the rooms we create, and recreate, to survive.