Grand Designs: The Most Expensive Sets Ever Built for a Hindi TV Serial

For decades, the modest single-camera setup of a Mumbai studio was enough to tell a Hindi television story. Then budgets exploded, the cameras multiplied, and entire townships began rising inside film city lots. Today, a flagship serial can spend more on its standing sets than a mid-tier Bollywood film spends on its entire shoot, and the results are visible every weekday evening to millions of households across South Asia, the Gulf, the United Kingdom, and the sprawling Indian diaspora scattered through suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

The shift happened gradually, then suddenly. Producers realised that audiences had grown up on streaming spectacles from the West and now expected their daily soap to feel cinematic. A set is no longer a backdrop; it is a character, a mood board, a marketing asset, and a fan pilgrimage site once the cameras stop rolling. The most expensive sets ever built for a Hindi TV serial reflect this arms race, where every haveli doorway, marble staircase, and hand-painted mural is calibrated for both emotional weight and Instagram virality.

For viewers tuning in from Harris Park or Dandenong, these elaborate worlds offer a slice of home rendered at a scale that even a return trip to Mumbai rarely delivers. The serials export a particular fantasy of India, one where every family lives in a duplex the size of a small Australian motel, and the cost of those illusions is worth examining in detail.

Why Hindi Television Has Embraced Architectural Spectacle

The economics of daily soap production push producers toward permanent sets. A serial shoots between 250 and 300 episodes a year, often running for half a decade or longer. Building a set once and amortising it across thousands of episodes is far cheaper than striking and rebuilding every few months. Producers go big, knowing the structure will pay for itself many times over.

There is also the matter of prestige. A serial that airs on Star Plus, Colors TV, or Zee TV competes for advertising revenue against reality programming, cricket broadcasts, and streaming originals. Producers know that a jaw-dropping opening shot, a sweeping drone reveal of a fictional mansion, will be clipped, shared, and memed across social platforms. The set becomes a silent salesperson, recruiting viewers who might never have heard of the show.

Then there is cultural cachet. A grand set signals that the story inside it matters, that the family at its centre is wealthy enough, troubled enough, or romantic enough to warrant the visual scale. When audiences in Brisbane apartment blocks or Perth share houses see a chandelier the size of a small car hanging in a fictional drawing room, they register the wealth on behalf of the characters, and the bargain between viewer and show is sealed.

The Shah Residence and the Anupamaa Universe

Few sets in recent memory have carried as much cultural weight as the Shah household in Anupamaa. Built inside Film City in Goregaon, the Shah residence sprawls across multiple connected sets, with the family living room, kitchen, and Anupama's small parlour each occupying a distinct soundstage. The art direction leans warm, lived-in, and middle class, which makes its scale more striking, since the design suggests a real family that has simply accumulated rooms over generations rather than a fantasy estate.

The show is also famous for its Shah house and the separate Kapadia mansion, an equally detailed build. Together, these sets reportedly cost the production house several crores to construct, with woodwork, brass fittings, and custom upholstery each requiring artisans flown in from Rajasthan and Gujarat. Fans in Melbourne's Glen Waverley often gather at community screenings, and a surprising amount of their post-episode chatter concerns which corner of the Shah living room was reframed this week. Curious viewers wanting to put names to the faces shuffling through that elaborate house can browse this a complete guide to Anupama's supporting cast and their real names for the full cast rundown.

What makes the Anupamaa sets particularly interesting is the restraint. Compared to the gilded fantasy of the Kapadia mansion, the Shah home feels almost ascetic, yet the construction cost is comparable. The difference lies in materials and finish, not square footage, and producers have spoken about choosing durability over flash so the set could survive a planned run of more than 2,000 episodes without looking worn.

Mughal-Era Grandeur in Jodha Akbar

When Zee TV greenlit Jodha Akbar in 2013, the production team faced a challenge that no daily soap had attempted at that scale: recreate sixteenth-century Mughal court life, in detail, six nights a week, for years. The set designers responded with what was then the most expensive build in Hindi television history, a sprawling palace complex with working fountains, hand-carved sandstone replicas, and a throne room lit by hundreds of oil lamps for the candlelit scenes.

Costumes were stored in a separate warehouse, but the sets themselves occupied nearly an acre of studio space. Artisans were commissioned to paint faux-miniature murals across the interior walls, a job that took more than a year to complete before the first episode aired. The result was a visual register that felt closer to a feature film than a daily serial, and Jodha Akbar set a benchmark that subsequent historical productions were measured against.

The Oberoi Mansion and Other Urban Palaces

Ishqbaaaz, which aired on Star Plus from 2016 to 2019, gave Hindi television one of its most talked-about sets: the Oberoi mansion, a white-marble fantasy of a Delhi business family home, complete with a sweeping cantilevered staircase, a rooftop pool deck, and a private elevator. Production designers openly cited the Lake Palace in Udaipur and the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur as visual references, then built their own streamlined version inside a Mumbai studio.

The serial reportedly allocated more than thirty crore rupees to its standing sets, an extraordinary figure for a show whose principal setting is a single family home. The investment paid off in the form of wedding sequences, Diwali episodes, and engagement functions that fans still rewatch years later. In the WhatsApp groups where Indian-Australian aunties in Parramatta dissect the latest plot twist, the Oberoi staircase remains a permanent reference point, a shorthand for "filthy rich, but tasteful."

Period Dramas and Their Reconstructed Worlds

Beyond the palace dramas, the last decade has seen Hindi serials venture further into historical reconstruction. Maharana Pratap, Bharat Ka Veer Putra, and the later seasons of Porus each commissioned sets that drew on archaeological references, museum consultations, and sometimes actual stone sourced from Rajasthani quarries. Porus reportedly built an entire riverside set with functioning water channels, a logistical nightmare that doubled the production budget and required a dedicated engineering team to keep the pumps running between takes.

These builds are expensive partly because they cannot be reused. A contemporary Mumbai mansion can serve as a backdrop for any number of subsequent serials, but a specific historical period demands period-correct furniture, weapons, fabrics, and architecture. When the serial ends, the sets are usually struck, and the materials find a secondary life on other productions or in storage yards that have become quiet museums of Hindi television history.

What Drives the Price Tag Skyward

The price tag on a sprawling Hindi serial set is rarely the result of any single decision. It is the cumulative weight of dozens of choices about materials, location, labour, and longevity, each pushing the final number further upward. A grand staircase built from reinforced concrete rather than plywood will survive a five-year run; that same staircase, dressed in imported Italian marble, will photograph beautifully for a wedding sequence that airs in prime time.

Producers also factor in the cost of constant maintenance. Daily shoots mean daily wear, and a polished marble floor needs rebuffing every few weeks, brass fittings need polishing, and silk drapes need replacing after a season of camera lights cook the colour out of them. The most expensive sets ever built for a Hindi TV serial carry a hidden ongoing bill that often exceeds the original construction cost over the life of the show.

A handful of cost categories dominate:

• Artisans and craft specialists. Hand-painted murals, carved jharokhas, inlaid marble, and bespoke upholstery require skilled labour that cannot be rushed.
• Studio real estate. Mumbai studio space is finite and expensive. A serial occupying two or three full soundstages for five years pays premium rent for the entire run.
• Materials and finishes. Real brass, imported tiles, genuine leather, and hardwood floors cannot be substituted convincingly.
• Lighting and rigging. A grand staircase or a multi-level set needs a permanent lighting grid, and the cabling often costs more than the carpentry beneath it.

Watching These Spectacles From the Australian Diaspora

For the nearly seven hundred thousand people of Indian heritage now living in Australia, Hindi serials are a daily ritual that bridges two time zones. Episodes upload to streaming platforms at odd hours by Sydney time, and fans have developed workarounds ranging from group chats that ping at the first frame to weekend catch-up sessions in community halls from Blacktown to Footscray. The elaborate sets matter here, because they offer a visual immersion that ordinary suburban living cannot.

Australian viewers bring their own slang and habits. It is not unusual to hear a Melbourne grandmother describe the Oberoi mansion as "absolute bonkers, mate," or for Sydney friends to settle in for a Sunday binge with pakoras and a brew, treating the serial less as a soap opera and more as a long-running family reunion. The investment producers pour into these sets is partly aimed at exactly that kind of communal viewing, the sense that what is on screen deserves a gathering, a snack, and a proper sit-down.

Those who cannot make the trip back to Mumbai gather in their own ways:

• Community screenings in hired halls around Harris Park, Parramatta, and the western Sydney suburbs during major plot twists.
• Festival watch parties organised around Diwali, Holi, and wedding seasons, often doubling as charity fundraisers for temple renovations.
• Family group chats that light up the moment the closing credits roll, debating costumes, dialogue, and the latest renovation of the central mansion.
• Sunday arvo binges that stretch across three or four episodes, fuelled by chai, samosas, and a running commentary from at least one auntie with strong opinions about the décor.

For those wanting to round out the experience with a cinematic detour, a look at classic Soviet New Year films offers an interesting counterpoint, where snow-dusted Soviet apartments and ice-rink dream sequences achieved a similar cultural grip on a different diaspora, all without leaving a soundstage.