Why Thoughtful Hospitality Is the Future of Premium Housing: Kunal RIshi, Krisumi Corpoartion

India’s luxury housing market has acquired a new vocabulary: developer brochures now speak of concierge desks, curated experiences, and five-star service standards, terms borrowed from an industry that has spent a century perfecting the discipline of hospitality. The borrowing is instructive. It suggests developers have correctly diagnosed what today’s buyer wants, even where the underlying product has not yet caught up with the promise.
Kunal Rishi, Chief Operating Officer, Krisumi Corporation

For much of the past two decades, the case for a luxury home in India rested on a narrow set of attributes: size, address, and the visible cost of finishes. This formula held because buyers had limited means of comparison. That condition no longer applies. The number of Indians with a net worth exceeding ₹1,000 crore rose from 1,013 in 2022 to 1,683 in 2025, according to the Hurun India Rich List.

This is a buyer with far greater exposure to well-run institutions abroad, and consequently a far lower tolerance for the ordinary failures of Indian residential upkeep. A marble lobby offers little reassurance to someone who has already noticed the lift has broken down twice in a month. Developers have largely responded to this shift by upgrading the lobby, a response that mistakes the symptom for the cause.

Japanese urban planning has long treated infrastructure as an obligation owed to the resident rather than an aesthetic flourish; transplanting this discipline into an Indian township is a challenging proposition for developers.

Kunal Rishi

Service and Discipline are not Interchangeable

The distinction worth drawing is between hospitality as an added service and hospitality as embedded planning discipline. A concierge desk or a welcome kit on move-in day can be introduced at almost any stage, staffed generously in the first year and thinned out once occupancy targets are met.

Planning discipline is a different order of commitment. It is decided at the drawing board, in drainage engineered to withstand an actual monsoon, in construction tolerances that do not show stress within eighteen months, and common areas proportioned for genuine daily use rather than a launch-day photograph. The first can be announced. The second has to be defended, at real cost, before a unit is sold.

A Test Case in Gurugram

KRISUMI Corporation, a joint venture between the Krishna Group and Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, illustrates the harder path. Japanese urban planning has long treated infrastructure as an obligation owed to the resident rather than an aesthetic flourish, and transplanting that habit into an Indian township, in a market still inclined to reward visible spend over invisible engineering, is a considerably more demanding proposition than another well-appointed clubhouse.

The wager is being tested in exactly the market where it matters most. Delhi-NCR recorded a 209 per cent jump in luxury home sales in the first half of 2025, with 3,960 homes priced at ₹6 crore and above changing hands, according to a CBRE-ASSOCHAM report, and Gurugram sits at the centre of that surge.

The premium attached to disciplined, professionally governed development is now visible nationally too. India ranks sixth globally in live branded residence projects and accounts for roughly 4 per cent of world supply, as per a Knight Frank India report, a sharp climb for a segment that barely existed a decade ago. Buyers, increasingly, are paying for continuity of standard rather than a fixed schedule of finishes.

No claim of hospitality in Indian real estate is tested at the point of sale. It is tested years later, in whether the landscaping still looks intentional and whether residents continue using the common spaces. Developers willing to be judged on that longer timeline are the ones likely to set the benchmark for what a serious address in India will mean over the next decade.