Indian design has always possessed a distinct vocabulary for shelter. From shaded verandahs to terracotta roofs, from the wooden post polished by generations of touch to the earthen wall whose irregularities record the life around it. At Eka’s new 1,500-square-foot flagship in Gurugram, these familiar gestures are recalled in fragments and given a contemporary life in a setting that feels deeply Indian without belonging to any one place in the country. It is a space that asks you to recognise something without quite being able to name it—a remembered house, perhaps, or an atmosphere carried forward from one generation to another—and in doing so creates a fitting home for the brand’s clothes, which have always found poetry in the ordinary.
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The Walls, Dressed in Eka
The starting point for Pashmin Shah and Satyajeet Patwardhan was an observation that feels simple until you begin to consider its implications: clothes and buildings both protect us, though at vastly different scales. A garment sits closest to the body; a room gives that body somewhere to rest, gather and belong. Once they began thinking of the two as related forms, the store ceased to function as a conventional retail backdrop and became an extension of Eka’s larger sensibility.
“We come from the background where India & Bharat co-exist quite comfortably within us. Having evolved over a long period of time, we have always seen vernacular as a foundation to build upon,” says Shah. The references that emerged from this thinking are deliberately distilled: elements of domestic architecture, familiar proportions and everyday building traditions, stripped of their literal identities and woven into the interior as impressions.
