Bleachers and a bungalow

Arati Menon Carroll visits an unconventional store in Mumbai.

Her anxiousness is palpable. After three years of making an emphatic success out of Bungalow 8, her niche design store in Mumbai that stood up to what she called the facelessness of mass retail, Maithili Ahluwalia is unveiling its next avataar. It's a new store with the same name.

Instead of being tucked away in a shady lane on Carmichael Road, it is now concealed under the tiered bleachers of Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium.

"This wasn't the safest choice to make. The rawness of the store's design itself, I mean there's no attempted embellishment," she says. Sure, there's untreated concrete and exposed piping and the surprising stepped ceiling that is the underside of the stadium's seating.

"I didn't know if people would get the concept of the interiors having been conceptualised like a real home," admits Ahluwalia. A quick glance around "" the "bedroom" has a pair of slippers next to the bed, a coaster on the side table and a kimono that rests casually on a chair.

Even display racks are designed as if they were actual storage units in an open-plan loft. "For me it was simple; how would I live if this was my home and what sorts of things would I have around?" she adds.

Affirmation has never eluded Ahluwalia. An economics graduate from Swarthmore, the 28-year-old surrendered her consulting bread-and-butter for the pursuit of design. The result was the precocious success that was Bungalow 8, noticed for breaking boundaries by following its philosophy of minimising clutter and maximising quality.

So what's changed? For one, it's gone up from 800 sq ft to 4,000 sq ft. What of the philosophy of the small shop in the leafy lane? Did Ahluwalia cave in to economies of scale?

"There has to be growth for you and your customer. The idea is to balance commercial viability with never feeling the pressure to sell what you don't want to."

Naturally there's more to choose from (among others, small sections for jewellery and fashion), but just enough to make believable the notion that it's a running "home" and no more. "I'm not interested in a fully stocked shop," says Ahluwalia. "Like that," she points to a cast iron bathtub sitting in the middle of the room, "I am not thinking how many SKUs I could have displayed instead of that."

More striking is the departure from the minimalism that Bungalow 8 distinctly suggested. Here there are rusty chairs and reading lamps, vintage glass bubble jugs, block printed kimonos and glitzy chandeliers all sitting comfortably next to each other. "I guess along the way, I developed a certain degree of confidence to mix-and-match genres "" glamour with rustic, industrial with glossy."

She adds, "Four years ago, minimalism was the thing." And this mix-and-match style just happens to be the "thing" today. The Milan and Maison & Objet design fairs this year were full of references to a convergence of various genres "" Baroque, Victorian, 50s modernism... Bungalow 8 pays similar homage, easing itself into the otherwise prickly middle ground between classic and trendy. Ahluwalia cuts in, "I don't want to be reduced to a trend. I want to showcase what I want to see in home design; eclecticism that's not necessarily "perfect" design."

A case of conscious imperfection? "There's too much deliberate flawlessness in current design. This store is the antidote to that, a bit of a statement against the instinct to clone."

Central to this is the process of selection, and Ahluwalia follows a relentless method of editing and choosing products. The odd alarm clock or cigarette holder might find its way in, if it is in alignment with the "stories" that govern grouping of products.

A customer should know better than to ask where she got the antique iron cupboard teeming with ikat silks; Ahluwalia guards her suppliers zealously. "Sometimes it is a Paris flea market or even eBay," she laughs.

"My dad asked me if customers were ready for the store," she says. "but retail cannot be anything but personally driven. I've stuck my neck out and said, 'this is how I like to live'."

She adds, "Maybe if everybody's reaction was 'Oh god' it wouldn't be such a bad thing, it would mean my job to push people towards the unexpected is done."