Gargi Gupta visits the MoonRiver store and finds that organised madness is the design principle at work in its layout and design.
Most high-end home accessories stores tread a thin line between being a treasure trove and a cluttered space with stuff in all manner of shapes, materials and sizes lined all over the floor, stacked full on shelves that take up the better part of the walls, and sometimes even hang from the ceiling.
MoonRiver, the high-end home accessories store in the capital, falls somewhere between the two. “‘A quiet madness’ is how one of my clients called it,” says Radhika Gupta, the store’s proprietor.
That’s a fitting, if generous, description. MoonRiver’s USP is design and Gupta prides herself on being the first, and in some cases the only, store in India to stock some of the most celebrated icons of international design — Phillip Starck’s famous transparent polycarbonate Victoria Ghost chairs for Kartell; ceramics from the Italian Bosa (including the “Alaya ceramic basket” — a kadhai really — that the Indian designer Satyendra Pakhale showcased for the brand in last year’s Milan design week); and the home accessories lines of fashion designers Donna Karan and Kenzo.
But it’s not all design — Gupta also stocks several brands of Murano hand-blown glass like Salviati, Ferro Murano and Venini; glassware from leading designer brands like LSA and Moser; Bussolari frames; limited edition scale models of famous buildings which are meant to be used as bookends, a signature product of British designer/crafts-house Timothy Richards; antiques from Burma and so on and on. Bits and pieces from all parts of the world, as in the song “Moon River” (Gupta’s favourite, and the origin of the store’s name) — “Two drifters off to see the world/ There’s such a lot of world to see...”
All of these are very beautiful and all that, but the need to pack in so much stuff into a single store can create a sense of clutter, or at any rate the feeling that you need to tread carefully lest you knock something over.
At MoonRiver, Gupta has tried to obviate some of the problems by using a few basic principles of good design. For one, arranging the entire space into a naturally flowing walk-through that moves fluidly from one nook arranged around one line of products to another, and so on. And two, the use of colours and shapes.
“It’s something most design schools teach — go from light to dark colours, go by tonal quality, adding one accent to an arrangement, so that it’s easy on the eye,” she says.
Gupta is not a trained designer (in fact she was at law school in London when the design bug bit her), but how to arrange colours is one design principle that she seems to have grasped with some success.
So, immediately, as you enter MoonRiver, you are confronted with an arrangement of green-tinted glassware in various shades, followed by amber; opposite is a line of lacquer products in a rich red with gold tints, followed by an arrangement on two diagonal planks set in narrow rectangular niches in the wall of black ceramic ware.
Beyond the partition is a range of clear glassware in blue, turquoise and lilac, which overlooks a ceiling-high shelf full of clear glass tumblers, plates, bowls and crystal, and thence to black and gold, on one hand, facing another island of products in red and gold.
The MoonRiver store is located in an old two-storied house in Defence Colony — it must have been built for residential use but when Gupta bought it five years ago, it was being used as a gym, so there is also a commercial over-stamp in the way the rooms are laid out.
“We kept it more or less as it was, including the little mandir and the lotus pond in front,” says Gupta, who conceived of the interiors herself with some inputs from her designer friends Vivek Narang and Amrish Arora.
“We changed the facade a bit, to put in these slate walls and made the windows larger so that natural light would come in. Even the yellow and white basic mosaic flooring was left untouched on the ground floor and the stairs; we only added the epoxy flooring on the first floor which gives it a very studio look.”
As it stands, the straight lines and clean angles of the building structure itself, the white coloured window panes, the modular tables with mirror tops, the shelves in dark wood and the rectangular niches present an interesting contrast with the rich colours and the funky, flowing shapes of the lamps, pots, jugs, trays, vases that abound everywhere.
Upstairs, the clutter clears a little. This is the designer apparel section, and so the design brief seems to have been to create a congenial space where the entire business of buying clothes can be done with some comfort and style.
So, you have a clear space, ringed by large french windows and a seating arrangement in the middle — contrasting pleasingly with the white and black print of the chair, the light epoxy floors and the white walls.
