Last month, Perspective, the architecture and design magazine honoured two Delhi-based design principals in its 13th annual 40-under-40 awards. Pankhuri Goel, 35, and Asha Sairam, 31, from Studio Lotus, won in the interior design category at the awards that recognise talent from Asia. Over their decade with Lotus, their career trajectories have seen a gradual rise: Asha started as an intern while studying communication design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology; Pankhuri was a junior principal, three years after graduating with a degree in exhibition design from the National Institute of Design.
Back from Hong Kong, the duo talks about how India is well-placed to cater to interior design globally, and how their experience with Lotus has shaped their unique way of working with client briefs.
Edited excerpts.
Has either of you built a niche in the interior design space?
Pankhuri: That’s something we’ve consciously not done. It just so happened that I’ve done more retail and adaptive reuse, and Asha has done F&B and hospitality. We tried to create that distinction at some point, but what’s really exciting for us, and the teams that work with us, is the fact that we’re constantly doing something new.
What’s new about your approach as designers?
Pankhuri: What we try to do is really engage, question, and poke holes in the client’s brief. We find that doing that produces results far richer than what we create on our own with their concept note.
You’ve both dealt with big brands, in terms of name and scale. Were you able to keep this up with them too?
Pankhuri: We’ve been lucky with clients who are deeply involved. I’ve been working with Royal Enfield for 6-7 years now, but it started when they were going through a complete overhaul in branding. They wanted a deeper connect with the youth, so they came to us for more than just a design of their retail space. They wanted us to be partners through the branding change, which manifested in their flagship store ( in Saket).
The story that we came up with was that this isn’t about just the motorcycle, but the experience of motorcycling. It was a little shift but we created a whole story of a man so passionate about motorcycles and motorcycling that he starts living in his garage. Everything we did in the retail experience, was governed by this story: what is the kind of furniture he will have in his garage, what are the artworks he’d have up?
Royal Enfield has now rolled out some 500 odd stores with the same retail identity across the world, as they’re expanding.
I think these projects become rich because of the stories we manage to tell. Currently, we’re doing a campus for Royal Enfield in Chennai. The architecture, the interiors, everything.
Asha, you’ve remotely designed for Masti in Dubai, from Delhi. How were you able to transfer the ‘Indian’ identity?
Asha: Masti was one of our first international projects. [After a lot of thought] we took the most obvious Indian metaphors celebrated it. Like a stained-glass elephant at the bar. What we realised is that in the West, when you’re doing restaurants, you’d choose furniture from catalogues of brands that already exist. But doing it from India, Masti became a great opportunity to collaborate with many people. Like, we roped in Ayush Kasliwal, a designer in Jaipur who works with craftsmen, so he made all the decorative lights here.
Pankhuri: Now, in most of the international projects, we actually manufacture most things here and ship them.
Will the work you saw at the Perspective Awards influence your practice going forward?
Pankhuri: I personally wasn’t very overwhelmed by what we saw there. I think what we do would be at par, and in some ways probably richer due to the access to craft in India. But also people are experimenting a lot. At Lotus, we’re always saying things should be timeless, so I think that’s something that changed for me. The F&B space is so fast-moving that you can do something really experimental.
Also, being in Hong Kong city — there’s so much happening in the area of adaptive reuse, because it’s such a congested city. They’re trying to use every structure and create a new purpose for it. In India, we just let things lie as they are instead of just using spaces. That I think, was the big learning.
What would you like to see more now from the design industry in India?
Asha: More soul, more stories, more craft, more narratives. Specifically the F&B market in India is so under-evolved. Can a restaurant be other things? You can’t keep slotting into one purpose spaces any more, because people no long use spaces in that way. The idea is to question how we can expand the definition a space and its use.
Pankhuri: And only then do you actually influence people and lifestyles. That’s what our game is really about.