Mumbai-based Rushabh Parekh Design Studio (RPDS) channels a remarkable acumen for texturing, customised fabrication and digital styling to create highly interactive interior projects.
Rushabh Parekh Design Studio (RPDS) was established in 2008, and has built a repertoire that can become a study-book of exploration of textures, shapes, and fabrics in design projects. Led by Rushabh Parekh, the team is stringently committed to juxtaposing different design elements and expertly making them look like cohesive spaces. The projects, like the three mentioned below, also often contain smaller, individualised pockets of privacy for the residents and guests.
Brick House & Café, Mumbai
This project is representative of RPDS’ leitmotif – playing with seemingly contradictory design elements and fortifying them into one appealing whole. The interiors of this bar and café have the solid, industrial quality of old English taverns, but they hide subtleties galore in their crevices.
True to its name, sweeps of exposed brick walls dominate the 1,500 sq ft space, and are aided in their brooding aura by slats of wood that make up parts of the ceiling and floor.
Bunty Arora, the owner, had envisaged an ensconce in the midst of the boisterous Lokhandwala Complex, and RPDS took that brief to heart to build a sound-proof-seeming escape filled with natural light, minimal frills and all the possibilities of alcohol-induced revelry.
The bar, in spite of its simplicity or possibly because of it, is a visual spectacle that has a rough-hewn brick background and bar-table base; the latter topped with wood and lit up by a neat cluster of delightfully artsy Edison bulbs.
The carefully unrefined edges are contrasted and complemented by the shiny black sofa upholstery, green-and-black chairs, stone surfaces and polished wood.
The bar top breaches its boundaries on one end and slides into the exterior terrace – another contrast in that is the canopied, greenery-adorned and sunlight-drenched neighbour to the subdued seriousness of the main area. RPDS couldn’t have thought up a better escape from the location’s market forces than this.
Tryst Night Club, Mumbai
“Tryst is not just a place to dance, but rather it is designed to maximise individualised sensations,” states the design team. Located in Lower Parel at the Phoenix Mills Compound, this nightclub’s 2,500 sq ft of interior swathe has been built to incorporate ‘hard’ and soft’ personalised spaces, along with the fluid segments that will tempt guests to move and dance in.
Tryst looks like the realisation of every music fan’s dream – of moving to music inside a record player; of riding electric notes like waves in a trance. This space brings together RPDS’ ingenious treatment of geometric shapes and custom lighting – here spewing or wrapped in psychedelic neon colours – to create a breath-taking effect of movement.
From the seating coves to the walls and the consoles, here exists an almost mathematical commitment to lit-up lines and angles. The bar’s background wall is a phalanx of graceful, custom-fabricated flaps that will effortlessly move in the imaginations of many a patron on many a night.
RPDS was asked to design “a space of intimacy and exclusivity”, and the team successfully added a defining element of movement to the scheme. After all, how many nightclubs can claim to move with the music, just as its guests do?
Digital Design And Fabrication Techniques
RPDS likes to push boundaries in spatial conception and over its lifetime the firm has relied on mixing textures, digital design and imaging and innovative fabrication to create a unique language of interior and exterior design. Lattices, meshes, lines, and waves, all live in harmony in this design team’s work landscape.
This effect is greatly enhanced by a bold bent towards a kaleidoscope of materials and colours. The firm’s proposed designs often straddle a range from pristine white fiberglass that creates futuristic spaces, to carbon-like geometrical shape-shifting on façades, like for ‘Parinee 1’ and other building towers. Sharp, neon-lit lines often cleave through standard glass façade surfaces, or split them into more visually digestible sections.
Be it through impetuous encasings, or tight mesh wrappings, façades here are not allowed to be ordinary. Just like with the interiors, where there are wisps of deep shades of colour, smooth and knotted upholstery, and renderings of Rorschach to avoid creating anything even remotely boring and predictable.
Text By Shruti Nambiar
Photographs Courtesy The Designer
Contact
email: info@rpds.in
