A residential project is not a product. It is a picture — framed, lit, cast, shot and cut. This is how we made ours, in the words of the people who stood behind the camera.
Act I
The concept.
Most residential projects begin with a land parcel and a financial model. Forbes Fab Luxe began with an argument.
The argument was this — that luxury, in the Indian residential market, had become so thoroughly marketed that it had ceased to mean anything. Every tower in every city was calling itself luxury. Every brochure used the same words. Every website showed the same marble lobbies and the same stock photography of a family in white linen. Somewhere in the last decade, the word had slipped its moorings and drifted away from the things it was supposed to describe.
We started Fab Luxe with the goal of reattaching the word to its meaning. Luxury, we decided, was not about the material on the wall. It was about the absence of compromise on the parts of the building the resident actually touches — the air, the space, the silence, the light, the water, the service. If we could get those six things right, we could afford to be quiet about everything else. And so the first three months of the project were spent arguing, not drawing. Arguing about ceiling heights. Arguing about air quality. Arguing about elevator cycle times and acoustic isolation and basement ramp turning radii. Arguing about every number that would eventually become invisible once the building was finished, because the invisible numbers are the ones that actually decide how it feels to live somewhere.
By the end of those three months, we had a brief. It was forty-seven pages long. It contained fifty-four non-negotiable specifications. It reduced the total permissible unit count on the site by approximately twenty-two per cent compared to a FAR-maximised alternative. And it was signed in triplicate before a single line was drawn on a sheet of paper.
"We sketched out what the resident feels when the lift doors open on their floor — light, air, silence, the absence of hotel-corridor carpet — and then worked backwards from that feeling to the specifications that would produce it. Everything on this project came from that exercise."
— Design Director, Forbes Fab Luxe
The argument, in other words, was the project. Everything that followed — the site plan, the towers, the clubhouse, the amenities, the finishes — was a reading of that argument into built form. It is why we think of Fab Luxe as a single piece of work with a single point of view, rather than a collection of independently optimised sub-systems. And it is why, when we talk about it, we talk about it the way a film director talks about a picture.
The double-height lobby at Fab Luxe — marble walls, crystal chandelier, and the first frame of the picture.
Act II
The casting.
If Act I is the concept, Act II is the casting — the choice of who would actually make the film. In a residential project, the cast is the consultant team. And like a film, you can either spend the casting budget on one famous name and skimp on everyone else, or you can build a deep ensemble where every role is played by someone who has done it before.
We went with the ensemble. The architect of record is a firm with eighteen years of residential practice and fourteen completed projects in Delhi-NCR, six of them above one hundred metres. The structural engineer engineered three of the tallest residential towers currently standing in Gurugram. The MEP consultant has certified nine IGBC Platinum residential projects. The landscape architect is an Australian studio with work in Sydney, Singapore and New Delhi. The principal contractor has direct execution experience on residential high-rises above one hundred and twenty metres across Mumbai, Gurugram and Bangalore. The construction monitor — and this is the part we are proudest of — is NBCC, a Government of India public sector undertaking, engaged independently to audit every milestone of the build.
None of these consultants are household names. That was deliberate. A household-name architect wants credit more than they want to execute, and credit is the enemy of the kind of quiet, specification-led work we wanted on Fab Luxe. Our consultants all share one trait — a resume thick with completed projects, not renderings. Every drawing on this job was signed by someone who had already delivered the thing they were being asked to design. That is an unusual standard in Indian luxury residential work. We think it should be the default standard.
The Forbes team itself
Forbes Global Properties India is led by a principal partner group of six senior real estate executives with an average of twenty-two years of Indian residential experience. Three of them previously led luxury residential programmes at listed Indian developers. The board includes two non-executive directors from Forbes New York and one independent director who was formerly a senior partner at a Big Four audit practice in India. The project team on Fab Luxe is led day-to-day by a project director with eleven years of delivered residential projects at a major Mumbai developer before joining Forbes. The team has been stable since brief sign-off in January 2024, which matters more than it sounds, because residential projects with stable teams finish closer to their original specification than projects with rotating teams.
"On most projects the architect draws, the contractor builds, and the developer adjudicates between the two. On this project the three of us sat in the same room once a week for the first nine months, and we do not think any of the three of us could tell you afterwards which specifications came from which seat."
— Project Director, Forbes Fab Luxe
A residence, like a film, is ultimately judged on craft. Craft is the minutiae that the audience does not consciously notice but that, collectively, decides whether the whole thing feels convincing.
Here are the pieces of craft we are most proud of on Fab Luxe. We list them not because they are the only ones that matter but because they are the ones we argued about the hardest, and the ones that will probably be invisible to anyone who has not sat in the design meetings.
The air
The tower-wide AQI management system is the signature engineering feature of the project and the decision that most visibly distinguishes Fab Luxe from every other luxury tower in Greater Noida West. It is a twin-stage HEPA and activated-carbon filtration assembly installed at the central air handling unit on each tower's podium roof, feeding positively pressurised treated air to every residence through dedicated risers. Indoor AQI stays below fifty regardless of outdoor conditions. The system adds approximately seven per cent to the superstructure budget. It was in the brief on day one and it survived every subsequent round of value engineering without being touched.
The ceiling height
Every habitable floor has a ten-foot clear ceiling. The living and dining rooms have an eleven-foot clear ceiling. That sounds like a small number, and it is — but a single foot of additional ceiling height is the difference between a room that feels like a room and a room that feels like a hotel. The reason most luxury projects cannot deliver eleven feet in the living room is that it forces an increase in structural floor-to-floor height, which reduces the total number of floors for the same building envelope, which reduces the total salable area. We accepted the loss of area without argument because the alternative was a worse product.
The space between towers
No tower on Fab Luxe is closer than thirty-two metres to its nearest neighbour. In many luxury residential projects the inter-tower spacing is twenty-two to twenty-six metres. The additional six to ten metres we specified means that every residence gets uninterrupted daylight on at least two sides and every balcony faces open air rather than the window of another apartment. This single specification, more than any other, decides how the residences will feel to live in.
The balcony
Every residence has a continuous full-width balcony. Not a French window. Not a Juliet balcony. Not a corner balcony on one side of the apartment only. A full, continuous, accessible balcony running the entire width of the living room and opening through a three-panel sliding door. This was one of the four non-negotiable constraints in the brief and it was the single specification most frequently challenged by the contractor during value-engineering reviews. We refused every challenge.
The clubhouse
Thirty-five thousand square feet on three levels with a fifty-metre lap pool, a children's pool, a gymnasium, a yoga pavilion, a spa with steam and sauna, squash and badminton courts, a private theatre, a banquet hall, a business lounge, a library, a co-working suite, a cigar room, a wine cellar, a pet spa and a twenty-four-hour concierge desk. Sixty-four amenities in total. The size and range of the clubhouse is roughly twice that of the second-largest clubhouse in Greater Noida West. It is, on its own, a distinguishing feature of the project.
The infinity pool at night — illuminated water, lounge chairs, and the kind of evening that does not require leaving the estate.
Act IV
The schedule.
A film has a shooting schedule. A residential project has a construction schedule. Both are promises, and both are judged on whether they are kept.
Our construction schedule for Fab Luxe was drawn up with the principal contractor in February 2024 and has been held to every milestone since. Site mobilisation was completed in April 2024. The first raft was poured in July 2024. Tower 1 reached plinth level in December 2024 and is currently at the sixteenth floor of superstructure. Tower 2 and Tower 3 are at the thirteenth and eleventh floors respectively. Towers 4 through 11 are at varying stages of substructure and superstructure. Possession is scheduled for December 2028, with a contractual cushion of six months built into the brochure timeline.
Every milestone is audited independently by NBCC and the report is available to buyers on request. Every month, the project team publishes a progress update with photographs, schedule variance analysis, and any scope changes. Every quarter, the principal partners of Forbes Global Properties India review the project in person and sign off on the next quarter's schedule. This is the kind of governance that, frankly, should not be unusual in Indian luxury residential work — but we have learned that if you do not write it down on the about page, it does not get believed. So: here it is, written down.
If the project runs late, we will say so. If the specifications change, we will say so. If a consultant leaves the team, we will say so. Silence is not a disclosure strategy we believe in. The Forbes editorial culture does not tolerate silence from our reporters and we do not want it from our construction team either.
There is an old industry joke in Indian real estate that a residential project has three lifespans. The first is the launch brochure. The second is the half-built site. The third is the finished tower. Most projects lose something important between each of those three stages.
We built this about page to be the one thing that stays constant across all three. Every claim on this page is the claim we will defend at handover in 2028. If we come to 2028 and something on this page has changed — a specification that was reduced, a consultant who left the project, a finish that was substituted — then this page will be the place where you hold us to it. We think that is a more useful function for an "about us" than a list of awards and a group photograph of the principals.
So thank you, really, for reading this far. Fab Luxe is the most ambitious single project Forbes Global Properties India has undertaken and it will take the next thirty months to finish. If you would like to see it in person — and you should, because the thirteen acres read very differently at ground level than they do on a site plan — please come. Write to our residence advisor at residences@forbesresidences.in and we will schedule a private visit at your convenience. We will walk the site with you. We will take questions. We will not rush the tour.
— The Forbes Residences Editors, Sector 4 Greater Noida West, April 2026