From Sketchbook to Livspace at 18: How Maitri Patel Designed Her Way Into a Placement

When Maitri Patel walked into her interview with Livspace, Asia’s largest home-interiors platform, she did not bring a rehearsed pitch. She brought a fully designed project, researched, rendered, and documented, that she had built specifically for the company she wanted to work for. She was 18 years old, an interior design diploma student at Parul Institute of Design, and it worked: she joined Livspace as a junior interior designer. Her story is a case study in how preparation, not luck, creates opportunity.

This achievement was never the result of one interview, one project, or one lucky opportunity. It was built through hundreds of small decisions.
– Maitri Patel

Design was not an inherited profession in Maitri’s family, but creativity was, and she traces most of it to her mother. One story stays with her: passing a shop window as a child, her mother admired an expensive dress, then went home, found similar material, and recreated it herself. Another time, when a removed air-conditioning unit left an unsightly dent in a wall, her mother painted a canvas to cover it rather than call a contractor. Growing up around that kind of everyday inventiveness, Maitri believes, planted the creative instinct she would later build a career on.

For most of school, Maitri assumed her future was medicine; a consistent top-two ranker, she expected to pursue NEET and become a pathologist. Design entered almost by accident. During a summer visit to Kutch, an uncle with experience in the field noticed a blouse she had hand-painted with lotus patterns and sat her down for a two-to-three-hour explanation of what architecture and interior design actually were. That single conversation reframed everything. From then on, she became relentless about the question, asking everyone she met what design work involved, driven by a clear wish: A career that left room for creativity, hobbies, and the people she loved..

Maitri considered design institutes in Mumbai and Pune first, but distance ruled out one and cultural fit the other, and a strong preference for Gujarat kept pulling her home. She did not initially know Parul offered the specific interior design diploma she wanted; once she found out, a single campus visit settled it. The first person she met, interior design faculty member Hannakumari Chauhan, explained the program, and, as Maitri puts it, half the decision was made the moment she saw the campus. She has described it since it is one of the most beautiful places she has studied. Turn your passion for design into a future-ready career with programs designed to build your creative & technical expertise. Explore the B.Des in Furniture & Interior Design, Master of Design in Interior Design, Diploma in Interior & Furniture Design, and Certificate Program in Interior Designing, and take the next step towards designing inspiring spaces!

Her first semester centred on sketching and Photoshop and, she says, completely transformed how she saw design. A classmate, Krisha, became her guide to sketching technique, while faculty, including Sanjay Sir, trained at Banaras Hindu University, introduced perspective, life drawing, and styles from cross-hatching to stippling. A recurring “Word of the Day” exercise, producing something connected to a single word each day for six months, stretched her creativity in a way she still credits. Over time her toolkit widened to AutoCAD, SketchUp, V-Ray, and more; the technical grounding covered how to become an interior designer.

She was already proving herself beyond coursework. A five-year habit of practising portraits produced her first paid work, a large commissioned portrait sold within her first semester, and a 36-hour hackathon with teammates Krisha and Pratham produced HRIDHYA, an AI-powered wearable concept for monitoring toddlers, which placed among the top 20 teams. She also served as class representative and anchored institutional events, quietly building the communication skills that would matter later. Her academic record, opening with a perfect 10 CGPA, reflected a refusal to hand in work she was not proud of.

When Maitri learned Livspace was coming to campus, she rejected the idea of a standard portfolio review. Instead, in a single week, she designed LivHub, a concept for a dedicated designer workstation built specifically for Livspace’s own teams and inspired by the company’s brand, taking it from research and brand analysis through 3D modeling and rendering to full documentation. That strategy, and why it worked, is the subject of how to stand out in a design interview

The same date that marked the beginning of my academic journey became the beginning of my corporate career.
– Maitri Patel

There is one detail Maitri returns to more than any award: a date. She entered Parul University for the first time on 14 July 2024. Exactly two years later, on 14 July 2026, she walked into Livspace for her first day. Nothing about the coincidence was planned, and she treats it as a reminder that consistent effort has a way of bringing things full circle. When the selection call came, her first instinct was not to call her parents but her grandmother in Kutch, the person she has always shared everything with.

At Livspace, she is working on manufacturing, designing, and how in-house execution happens. Her day is built around design software, showroom walkthroughs, working under senior designers, and attending client meetings. She said, “The corporate world is truly different from college life, but it gives you confidence and skills to work in!”

She does not see the placement as an endpoint but as a first milestone, with an eventual ambition to build a design practice of her own, guided by a personal framework she developed as a student, explained in “What Makes a Good Design.”