These unique pooja room designs will inspire you just in time for Diwali

1. Play with Lighting in Your Pooja Room

Your pooja room design can work with lighting to provide a mood in the space or create a spotlight on an idol. While you could add bright lights or leave the room open to natural ventilation and brightness, if your pooja room is an enclosed one, you could also create a darker space, drawing attention and light only to the focal point in the room—the idol or figure of worship.

Style Tip: When playing with light, it is a good idea to also consider contrasting tones of colour. In this dark pooja room, the floors and walls are in a rich, deep colour of brown, which is offset by the burnt gold ceiling above. These textures and shades complement the Ganesh idol—placed as the pièce de résistance in the centre of the room—which is further highlighted with a soft warm spotlight. When playing with colour and light, you could also consider installing the latest LED smart light bulbs which can add a rainbow of hues to a room and work with voice activation or pair with virtual assistants, such as Siri or Alexa.

2. A Pooja Room Design for the Maximalist's Home

Temple design for home allows maximalists to indulge in opulent and dramatic designs, while also providing an opportunity to go all out and incorporate unique features into their pooja room, resulting in a worship space that is not only conducive to prayer but also reflects their personal sense of style. With a grand tiered wooden ceiling, this room mirrors every larger-than-life décor elements with its gold accents, sleek marble floors, clear glass walls on opposite sides of the room (allowing natural light and ventilation) and two large plush seating consoles. The entire space is perfect for a large family that gathers together for pools or regularly likes to host prayer meets for followers of the same faith.

3. A Private Pooja Room for a Small Space Home

One’s belief or faith is personal to them and, often, something that they would like to keep private and not open to the rest of the world. While for some homes, a pooja room design is integrated into the rest of the space and can also serve as its focal point, for others, this serves as a place for privacy. In such cases, concealing the pooja room adds the element of reserving this space as yours alone. This is also a clever idea in small space homes that need to utilise their floor plans judiciously, and don’t want the pooja room to take over the aesthetic of the rest of the house. 

Insider's Eye: No space for a pooja room? Consider one like this, where the closet space has been used to create a concealed place of worship in the house. When the mirrored doors are closed, the pooja room stays hidden from the rest of the world, adding an element of privacy. Mirrored walls and doors are also always the perfect tool to help trick the eye into seeing a room bigger than it really is.

4. A Home Without a Space for the Pooja Room

If your home doesn’t allow for a designated area for a pooja room or you don’t particularly believe in saving an entire space to it, but would like to incorporate elements of zen, tranquility and mediation in your house, consider adding it to your living room. With framed images of religious symbols or elements of nature, your favourite idols placed on a side table or even wind chines and bells hung in places that get a regular breeze, you can work in pieces of worship or faith into your home’s décor.

5. A Fuss-Free Pooja Room Design for Minimalists

If you want your pooja room to serve its purpose without any distractions, consider a simple, serene space with minimal, fuss-free décor. With interior elements that comprise solid wood panelling, marble or granite floors or accents and simple, clean white walls, you can create a place of worship that’s high on quality while also staying tranquil and open for meditation and prayer.

Style Tips: Simple accessories, such as wooden stools and platforms can be added to the room for sitting or placing objects. We love these simple matching wooden stools with Warli painting on them, which complements the aesthetic of the entire space.

6. Incorporating Art into Your Pooja Room Design

For many, their belief or faith may not include idol worship, but instead could be an idea or place that comes to mind and provides comfort. In such cases, you could add framed photos of this idea to a spot in your home which allows for tranquility or meditation, or commission a large photograph or painting of it to display across a wall.

Insider's Eye: In this home, a picture of the Golden Temple in Amritsar is placed across one side of the wall from the floor to the celling, adding an element of realness and grandeur. The plain white walls and floors serve as a clear canvas to highlight this photograph, while decorative arches placed in front of the print adds an ethnic aesthetic.

7. A Pooja Room Design with Plants

Since nature is believed to be God’s gift to mankind, it would be a symbolic gesture to place plants or flowering pots in your pooja room around your idols or symbols of worship. In several Indian customs and traditions, too, fresh flowers are placed or hung in garlands around the house and offered during worship as well. Placing and tending to small plants in the home mandir can serve as a fresher alternative, while also adding an element of nature and the outdoors to the space.

Style Tip: If your pooja room design allows for it, place all our idols and pieces of worship—along with the plants—next to a window for regular sunshine, ventilation and brightness in the space.

8. A Pooja Room Design that Ties the Entire Home Together

Your pooja room design can also serve as the focal point of the entire home. Whether placed as at the entrance of the house or as the central piece in the living room, you can create a place that allows for worship while also lending it’s quietude and tranquillity to the rest of the home. Taking inspiration from a Japanese zen room, this home’s pooja room has all the elements required to create a calm place for prayer, while it’s four glass walls allow the living room adjacent to it to also take in the soothing mood it creates for the areas around it.

9. Create a Pooja Room in the Living Room

If your pooja room design is to be incorporated within the living room, but you’d like to add an element of privacy to it, incorporate a room divider to cordon off the space. Whether you choose a slatted wooden divider to blend the pooja area into the rest of the living room or would like to use a screen full of images of your gods and pictures of your ancestors, the correct room divider will help you achieve the aesthetic and mood you want to create in the space. A living room pooja area also allows guests and visitors to pay homage during each visit to your home.

10. Marble and Glass Work Together for a Tranquil Pooja Room

When we think of the most peaceful and pristine landmark of worship in our country, our first thought probably goes to the Taj Mahal in Agra. With it being listed as one of the seven wonders of the world, one can seek inspiration from it when building a home’s pooja room. In India’s hot and tropical climate, marble has for centuries served as a material that’s helps cool the temperature of a space while also aesthetically adding brightness to the room it’s installed in. So it seems like a no brainer to work with this material in your pooja room.