Anokhi Shop and Organic café
Anokhi is perhaps
the most successful and acclaimed international textile brands of India. For over
40 years, Anokhi’s ideals have been those of conservation and development,
through the input of design, marketing and project funding. The Company is well
known as an alternative role model for good business practices, and the revival
of traditional textile craft. They have,
by way of design and innovation, taken the traditional craft of Hand-block
printing to a new pedestal, and placed it in the most modern of times. Their fashion
products, even though being essentially traditional, are crafted in the most
modern language and therefore have an equal appeal to the traditionalist as
well as the modernist. It can be described as a “sangam”
Such was the
challenge when it came to designing their flagship showroom in Jaipur. The design
philosophy was as follows:
The rich, traditional fabric needed a very
neutral backdrop for the colours to come out.
We wanted to be very sure that the displays are
not overtly designed to as to keep the focus on the merchandise and not
the interior.
Even though we wanted a minimalist backdrop, the
feel and essence needs to be traditional and crafty.
We wanted something that was highly customised
that makes the showroom exclusive.
We wanted to use something robust, both visually
and in essence, that reflects the company’s image of solid performance
over the years.
Of all the
materials that we could think of, Stone fits the bill perfectly. The following
are the descriptions of the above points that reinforces the usage of stone:
We preferred the dull yellow colour tone of the
‘Rainbow’ and ‘teak / Khatu’ sandstones. It beautifully contrasted the
bright and colourful blues and greens and reds of the hand-block printed
fabric. It had been used in the floors, on the walls, and as structural
displays that are held by steel. In the café, a neutral dull white tone of
‘Gwalior Mint’ with contrasting organic patterns of ‘Fossil stone’ with
handcrafted stone lamps gave an earthy, organic feel.
Sadly so, the regular stonework designs are
always conceived as ‘surface embellishments’ or ‘ornate carvings’. We on
the other hand, kept the design of the showroom and displays very simple
and paid more attention to ‘pure form’ rather than the clichéd ‘Surface embellishments’.
We wanted design to be a backdrop
rather than a foreground.
The sandstone merchandise displays, in form,
being very ‘straight-lined’ and minimalistic, are in fact totally
hand-crafted using locally made traditional tools and traditional
craftsmen. We wanted the stone to be presented as its own personality of colour
and texture.
We designed unique display systems in combination
of sandstone, wood, mild steel (MS) and stainless steel (SS), which were
highly customised and give exclusivity to the showroom.
Stone lends itself the virtue of solidity,
permanency and robustness, and precicely gave us the feel we were looking
for.