Like her dad Prabhakar Joshi, Nomita Joshi-Gupta wanted to be an architect. So, in 1995, Joshi-Gupta left her home and family in Bangalore, India for the United States to study architecture at Louisiana State University. A scholarship to LSU ruled out Joshi-Gupta’s alternates, USC and SCAD, a decision that now seems pre-destined. Joshi-Gupta and her father shared a dream that she would return to India and work with him at his firm. “In hindsight, I was fortunate to have fallen into Louisiana,” says Joshi-Gupta. Fortunate, not only because Joshi-Gupta met the Lafayette man she would marry and have two children with, but also because she would discover architecture wasn’t her destiny after all. Something her father knew before Joshi-Gupta accepted it. “He recognized in me that I loved interior design and always said I should study interior design,” says Joshi-Gupta. “I always said, ‘no I want to be an architect, so I’m going to be an architect.’” Settling in New Orleans, and after practicing architecture for years, Joshi-Gupta had a change of heart. In 2005, post-Hurricane Katrina, Joshi-Gupta was rebuilding her own flooded home. “In that process of renovating and looking for finishes, specifically sustainable and mindful finishes — we were all in the mindset of rebuilding correctly and responsibly and mindfully — I kind of fell back in love with interior design and interior architecture, and it made me realize that was the path I wanted to go forward.” Over the next few years, Joshi-Gupta focused on transitioning from architecture to interior design, opening Spruce design showroom in 2008. In another pivot, and as a testament to Joshi-Gupta’s business acumen, she eventually re-imagined Spruce as a wallpaper and fabric showroom. During the high point of the COVID-19 pandemic, she pivoted again to a by-appointment model and began carrying more exclusive brands, such as Scalamandré and Farrow & Ball, as well as moving her interior design services out from under Spruce, under its own moniker, Nomita Joshi Interior Design, named in honor of her father. While she lists a host of influences across architecture (Geoffrey Bawa, Carlos Scarpa and Frank Lloyd Wright), art (Carravagio, Georgia O’Keefe, and local artist David Borgerding), fashion (Alexander McQueen), when it comes to the biggest influence in her career, it remains the man who told her in his own way that, rather than follow in his footsteps, to forge her own design destiny.
Nomita Joshi Interior Design
22035 Magazine St., 504-616-7073, nomitajoshi.com
