Sauntering down Ahmedabad’s high street, one wouldn’t gamble on the chances of crossing paths with an otherworldly realm disguised as a jewellery boutique.
Project Name: Luire, Alchemised In Terracotta Splendor – A Retail Design That Defies The Conventional
Studio Name: Muselab
Location: Ahmedabad, India
Area: 1000 sq ft
Completion: October 2023
Principal Designers: Jasem Pirani, Huzefa Rangwala
Team: Fahim Khambati, Trupti Desai
Collaborations: Shailesh Rajput Design Studio, Flos India
With only a sliver of its demeanour peeking through the façade, the bijouterie destination lives up to its name — ‘luring’ one into its terracotta-doused embrace, gleaming with treasures. The cuboidal, jewel-box-like volume alchemically transmutes into a terracotta terrain, its walls undulating, a sinuous island at its locus, and a mystical lunar landscape blooming in the island’s midst.
While ideating for this lineage jeweller’s enterprise, we decided to do away with design dictums that have long reigned this typology. The traditional ‘across-the-counter’ (read: stark and transactional) modus operandi was turned on its head, and how! The result: a store that concocts a sensory, riveting, and curiosity-fuelled journey.
Commanding the layout’s nucleus, the ‘discovery island’ is a melange of many creative epiphanies. Its meandering form establishes an intentional trajectory that makes one pause, converse, and peruse within each indent studding its periphery. The experience is akin to savouring a delectable grazing table. On the menu is a sentient, lunar landscape, majestic in its topography of gritty craters and an army of ring bearers conceptualised by Artist Shailesh Rajput’s collaborative. These mystical ring bearers dwell within glass cloches, analogous to biodomes — a world within a world, in absolute equilibrium yet meshed seamlessly with the larger, selenic landscape.
Levitating over the island is a bespoke pendant light, a mirror image of the former’s shape, a visual yin-yang. Gauzy, stretched fabric and spotlights sensuously illuminate the adornments below, held delicately in the embrace of the legion of ring bearers. Amoebic mirrors line the blueprint along one edge, reflecting fragmented vignettes of the discovery island and are perfect for gazing into while adorning jewellery.
Rich with caresses of rusty terracotta and moody charcoal, Luire scripts a narrative steeped in theatrics that celebrates dualism: delicate and brilliant diamonds finding a home within the fiery Martian milieu. The two worlds couldn’t be further apart, yet in the same breath, any closer.
