The 7 best Art Deco buildings to see in Mumbai
Curved 1930s Art Deco apartment block with eyebrow balconies on Marine Drive, Mumbai
Seven 1930s and 1940s landmarks, ordered by how much they reward the walk, plus a route that links all 7 in about three hours.
How this list is ordered
Mumbai holds one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture anywhere, and the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2018. That listing covers the belt around Oval Maidan, where Gothic law courts face 1930s apartment blocks across a cricket pitch. The ranking below rewards three things: how intact the original detail is, whether you can get inside or at least into a lobby, and how easy it is to reach on foot from Churchgate or Colaba.
Almost all of these are working offices, cinemas or private flats, not museums, so the etiquette is simple: photograph from the pavement, ask a watchman before stepping into a lobby, and do not knock on flat doors. Nothing here charges an admission fee except the cinemas, where a ticket is the price of entry. Guided heritage walks run by Mumbai operators typically cost around ₹800 to ₹1,500 a head; book direct and confirm the meeting point, because monsoon dates shift.
1. Eros Cinema, Churchgate
Nothing else in the city stacks up like Eros. It sits in the Cambata Building on the corner facing Churchgate station, finished in 1938 to a design by Sohrabji Bhedwar, and its ziggurat massing in cream render and red Agra sandstone is the single most photographed Deco silhouette in Mumbai. Stand on the traffic island on Maharshi Karve Road for the full stepped profile, then walk the side elevation to see how the fins and vertical piers keep pulling the eye upward.
Screening status at Eros has changed more than once during long-running restoration work, so check what is showing before you plan an evening around it rather than assuming a film is on. Either way the exterior is the draw, and it is best in the first two hours after sunrise when the sandstone goes pink and the traffic is thin enough to cross. Ten minutes on foot from Churchgate station, which is what makes it the natural start of the whole loop.
2. New India Assurance Building, Fort
At 87 Mahatma Gandhi Road, this 1936 office block is where Mumbai's Deco went Indian. Architects Master, Sathe and Bhuta wrapped the lower storeys in sculpted figures by N. G. Pansare — spinners, potters, farmers, a chariot — carved in a hard-edged style that borrows from Deco geometry but reads as unmistakably local. It is a working insurance office, so the interest is entirely at pavement level, which is convenient because the figures sit low enough to study without a long lens.
Come on a Sunday morning when Fort empties out and you can stand in the road. Weekdays the pavement is a corridor of office workers and parked scooters, and the frieze is half-hidden behind hawker stalls. Pair it with a slow walk up Mahatma Gandhi Road towards Flora Fountain: the block after block of 1930s commercial fronts, with curved corner shopfronts and original lettering, is the real reason to do this stretch on foot rather than in a taxi.
3. The Oval Maidan apartment row
Empress Court, Court View and Palm Court form the terrace along the western edge of Oval Maidan, and together they beat any single building on this list for sheer effect. Stand in the middle of the maidan with the Bombay High Court and Rajabai Clock Tower behind you and the Deco row ahead, and you are looking at two empires of taste separated by a cricket ground. The names are half the pleasure — Deco Bombay loved a nautical or imperial flourish over the entrance.
Look for the recurring vocabulary: eyebrow shades over windows, curved balcony ends, ship-rail balustrades, terrazzo lobby floors visible through open gates, and the vertical stair-tower fin that gives each block its spine. The maidan is public and free, and cricket runs through most of the year outside the heaviest monsoon weeks. Enter from the Madame Cama Road side, walk the perimeter path anticlockwise, and give it 40 minutes rather than the ten most visitors allow.
4. Regal Cinema, Colaba
Regal opened in 1933 on the corner of Shahid Bhagat Singh Road, designed by Charles Stevens with interiors by the Czech artist Karl Schara, and it is the one Deco cinema on this list where buying a ticket is the reliable way in. It remains a single screen showing mainstream Hindi and English releases, with tickets usually in the low hundreds of rupees — confirm the current rate and show times with the cinema, since matinee pricing varies.
Go for the volume rather than the film: the sunburst ceiling, the mirrored foyer, the sweep of the balcony staircase. The building anchors the Colaba junction with the Prince of Wales Museum complex and the Taj Mahal Palace within a five-minute walk, so it slots neatly into a southern half-day. Skip the surrounding souvenir stalls if you are short on time; the interior is what you came for and a two-hour show is the ticket price of admission.
5. Marine Drive's Backbay curve
Soona Mahal at the Churchgate end, then Zaver Mahal, Kapur Mahal and Chateau Marine as you walk north — the Marine Drive frontage is an unbroken parade of 1930s and 1940s reclamation-era flats, and it earns fifth place only because the individual buildings are less spectacular than Eros while the ensemble is unbeatable. Walk the promenade side, not the building side, so you can read the roofline: turrets, stepped parapets, corner windows curving with the road.
It is roughly three kilometres from Nariman Point to Girgaon Chowpatty, or about 40 minutes at a strolling pace. Do it in the last hour of daylight and you get the buildings warm-lit and then the promenade lights coming on along the bay. If you only have time for one stretch, take the section between Soona Mahal and the Wankhede Stadium end, where the Deco facades are densest and the crossings are easiest.
6. Liberty Cinema, New Marine Lines
Liberty is the late arrival, opened in 1949 in a Deco-Moderne register that had already begun sliding towards mid-century modern: less ziggurat, more streamlining, a lobby of curved lines and coloured terrazzo. It seats over a thousand and has spent recent years working as an event and festival venue as much as a cinema, which means the way in is usually a film festival screening, a concert or a heritage-walk arrangement. Check listings before you make a trip specifically for the interior.
Combine it with Metro Cinema at Dhobi Talao, ten minutes away, whose 1938 rounded corner and vertical signage tower survive even though the interior is now a multiplex. The Metro to Liberty walk takes you through Marine Lines and Cross Maidan, past the tailoring and printing shops that have occupied these blocks for generations. This is the least polished section of the Deco trail and, for that reason, the most ordinary-Mumbai part of it.
7. Dhanraj Mahal and the Brabourne pavilion
Dhanraj Mahal, near the Regal junction at Apollo Bunder, is a great stepped stone mass of 1930s flats and offices built around courtyards, more monumental than decorative — worth five minutes on the way to the Gateway of India. Behind it, the Cricket Club of India's Brabourne Stadium off Veer Nariman Road has a Deco pavilion that ranks as one of the most graceful sports interiors in the country, though access depends on club rules and match days.
Both are supporting acts, which is why they share a slot. If you have to cut something from this itinerary, cut the Brabourne detour unless a match is on and tickets are public. Keep Dhanraj Mahal, because it sits exactly on the walking line between Regal and the Gateway and it shows the other side of Bombay Deco: not cinema glamour but the stone-faced apartment blocks that housed the merchants who paid for the glamour.
Walking all seven in one morning
Start at 8am at Churchgate station: Eros, then the Oval Maidan row, then east into Fort for the New India Assurance Building, then south down Mahatma Gandhi Road to Regal and Dhanraj Mahal. That is roughly two hours with photo stops and about four kilometres. Add Metro and Liberty as a northward extension in the late afternoon, and finish on Marine Drive at sunset for the Backbay curve. Cool-season mornings from November to February are the most comfortable window.
Bring water, a hat and small cash for chai; the Fort and Churchgate stretch has cafés on every second corner but few public toilets. In heavy monsoon weeks between June and September, the same route works if you do it as a series of short taxi hops between covered stretches — flooding on the low ground around Oval Maidan and Marine Lines is the main obstacle. Verify cinema screening times directly with each venue before committing an evening.
Before you book
What people ask before booking Churchgate.
Regal is the reliable one: buy a film ticket and you are inside a 1933 auditorium. Liberty opens for festivals and events. The apartment blocks are private homes, though watchmen sometimes allow a look at a lobby floor if you ask politely and do not photograph residents.
Before 9am for Eros, the Oval Maidan row and the New India Assurance frieze, when low light rakes across the render and traffic is thin. For Marine Drive, the last hour of daylight is better, because the west-facing facades take the sun and the promenade lights follow.
Yes if you want the architects, dates and the story of the Backbay Reclamation, which no plaque explains. Mumbai walk operators generally charge somewhere between ₹800 and ₹1,500 a person for two to three hours. Book direct, confirm the start point, and expect monsoon dates to move.
They face each other across Oval Maidan, which is the point of the UNESCO listing. Fifteen minutes on foot links the Bombay High Court and Rajabai Clock Tower to Empress Court and Eros, so you can see 1870s Gothic and 1930s Deco in a single loop without transport.
