Getting your own Picasso, this time on granite

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: This Diwali, why don’t you change the way your home looks? Try some butterflies fluttering on the floor or a few sinful black mirrors shimmering in the black-cemented floor at your new bar or a subtle gray-toned jacuzzi embolden with multi-hued marble chips for the bathroom. In vogue now maybe, but nothing new to humankind. It’s time to revisit terrazzo. In its comeback and trendy avatar, the ancient mosaic flooring, which originated as a simple mix of stone chips bound by cement, has travelled from the veranda of your ancestral home to the living room in the apartment you just shifted into.

For Anil Bansal, a Delhi-based architect, requests for designer terrazzo have been pouring in from all directions. This is making him innovate with new materials — glass, resins, motifs, borders, patterns — being tried on the new canvas. According to him, the best benefit of terrazzo has always been its seamless versatility in a basic material with less cost and no maintenance hassles later on. Then comes the extent of creativity and exclusitivity. A demand among those who want newness from the over-hyped marble flooring and over-used tiled floor, terrazzo could be done at costs ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 500 per sqft. “Another good aspect (of terrazzo) is that there is not much shift in the audience. The people who have had terrazzo in their homes for years still trust it. And those new to it, find it the latest style statement,” he says.