When was the final time you walked right into a brick-and-mortar retailer? Or wanted to, with the Blinkits, Instamarts, and Amazons delivering the whole lot to the doorstep? But regardless of the digital comfort, luxurious retail is engaging folks to step into bodily areas by evolving past transactions into sensory, immersive experiences — half atelier, half theatre, half shrine to custom.
“It’s all about immersion. Today’s consumer wants spaces that reveal the ‘why’ behind what they’re taking home,” says Astha Khetan, co-founder of The House of Things. Once an esteemed on-line platform, the model, as of March 2025, boasts a 25,000 sq.ft. idea retailer in Udaipur. Here, immersive vignettes and a thoughtfully curated spatial programme invite guests to decelerate and savour the shop — from celebrating the richness of pichwai work to hands-on engagement with a tactile materials library that features the whole lot from bone inlay to textural wallpapers.
Astha Khetan with The House of Things’ visitor curator Feroze Gujral
Retail as a moodboard
The mission of highlighting high quality craftsmanship and elevated design by experiential retail first bloomed in high-end, unique pockets: New Delhi’s Dhan Mill, as soon as a warehouse hub relationship again to 1978 and now an emblem of luxurious boasting over 65 curated boutiques; Jaipur’s stylish C Scheme and Civil Lines; and South Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, which noticed entrants resembling Tarun Tahliani’s Ensemble as early because the Nineteen Nineties.
What as soon as remained confined to those rarefied areas is quick changing into a mainstream retail technique, with manufacturers throughout value factors and throughout the nation embracing strategic model storytelling. Every larger-than-life flagship helmed by designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee in cities resembling Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi, and Hyderabad is a maximalist efficiency — very similar to his garments and jewelry. The retailer’s museum-like wallpapered and tapestry-lined partitions are crammed to the brim with pichwais, Tanjore work, classic pictures and lithographs, Mughal miniatures, and uncommon antiques. Not all of them are on the market. “It’s these enriching details that make me linger in the store, it makes me want to discover more,” says Reshma Bombaywala-Lezinska, a Mumbai-based jewelry designer and content material creator.
Sabyasachi’s maximalist interiors
Sanjay Garg’s Raw Mango stores channel the model’s ethos of fixed evolution into pared-down design, redefining Indian minimalism. The areas are usually left naked, uncooked, with no mannequins in sight, enabling key design parts to shine — resembling Garg’s tackle the Gandhian couch, the Indian baithak, which has discovered its manner into each outlet, or in Chennai, the constructing’s Art Deco heritage.
Raw Mango’s retailer in Chennai
The dialogue round Mumbai’s Nilaya Anthology by Asian Paints, one among India’s latest immersive design landmarks, has captured worldwide consideration. The idea does away with boundaries, each bodily and metaphysically: areas move into each other, with a double-height orangery bringing the outside indoors; and the strains between gallery, museum, retailer and expertise blur to carve out a sensorial sanctuary.
Nilaya Anthology
| Photo Credit:
Hashim Badani
“I grew up between Chennai and Bangalore, and I remember going to places like Sundari Silks, smelling the mallipoo, drinking coffee, and buying kanjeevaram saris,” says Pavitra Rajaram, design director of Asian Paints. “I feel like we’ve somehow lost the experience part of shopping now. So, I wanted Anthology to be a place of storytelling and experiences, where you come not to consume but to feel part of something, which then may drive your natural inclination to take home some part of that which resonates with you. But that’s not the primary intention.”
Fashion designer Ritu Beri’s Escape in Goa — with a 35-foot Portuguese-style façade in vibrant crimson and white, a bar, restaurant, and efficiency space, interspersed with Goan architectural parts resembling reduce laterite pathways and limestone mosaic ground tiles — isn’t just a retailer however a sanctuary of soul and story.
Escape’s Portuguese-style façade
She recollects a tiny Parisian boutique she as soon as visited, with Edith Piaf buzzing within the background. Every lovingly curated merchandise got here with a handwritten tag narrating its story. “That blend of warmth, curation, and personal touch stayed with me,” she reminisces, and is one thing she brings to Escape.
Inside Escape
Craft meets commerce
The international rise of experiential retail heralds technological integration — from augmented actuality (Farfetch’s London retailer linked on-line information to boost the offline expertise, letting customers entry their buy historical past and favourites in actual time), to the facility of social media (as early as 2011, IKEA invited 100 Facebook competitors winners for a personalised in a single day keep at its warehouse), and most just lately, AI integration, enabling personalised service, hands-free purchasing through voice recognition, clever product search, and lead technology.
But, in India, it carries distinctive weight: retail is a website for each consumption and conservation.For instance, famend jewelry designer Sunita Shekhawat’s Museum of Meenakari Heritage (MoMH) in Jaipur orchestrates an interesting dive into the historical past of enamelling from Renaissance Europe to its arrival in India. “At the Shekhawat Haveli, our retail space, we believe that even if someone leaves without a product, they should carry with them a deep appreciation for the centuries-old craft of meenakari and the cultural legacy it represents,” says Shekhawat.
Sunita Shekhawat
| Photo Credit:
Kewal Chholak
The by-appointment-only house options 4 personal pods for consumer interactions, clad in off-white araish lime stucco and with semi-vaulted ceilings embellished with frescoes created by artists specialising in miniature portray. “We used the traditional technique, reinterpreted at a scale that is not normally used, to generate narratives around the flora and fauna of Rajasthan, grounding it to its context,” reveals Ambrish Arora, founding principal at Studio Lotus.
Frescoes within the personal pods
| Photo Credit:
Ishita Sitwala
Arora and his workforce additionally developed the imposing, hand-carved crimson sandstone façade of MoMH, which pulls from Jaipur’s Indo-Saracenic roots whereas providing an ode to Shekhawat’s Jodhpuri roots. “At the ground level, you enter a space that feels like a museum, [and is] open to the city,” he explains. “This transforms the space from one where products are sold to one that disseminates knowledge — a cultural destination. Storytelling has become essential in creating a unique and memorable retail identity.”
Museum of Meenakari Heritage’s hand-carved crimson sandstone façade
| Photo Credit:
Ishita Sitwala
Small however luxe
Today’s experiential luxurious retail panorama has bifurcated into two distinct approaches: the grand spectacle of large flagship stores and the concentrated magnificence of smaller boutiques in premium enclaves like New Delhi’s Khan Market and Dhan Mill, the place stores like Collectklove and AMPM show that sq. footage doesn’t dictate design impression. MuseLAB’s design for sanitaryware seller Aquant’s new Mumbai showroom, as an illustration, is a veritable sorbet-toned wonderland with curved partitions that remind you of gelato swirls.
Aquant
| Photo Credit:
Nayan Soni Photography
Or the futuristic, Brutalist and layered world of Unconventional, the multi-designer retailer in Kolkata — the place a big, black, floor-to-ceiling sphere turns into the point of interest of the design, revealing the shop slowly as you stroll round it.
Unconventional
| Photo Credit:
Niveditaa Gupta
Singular design parts will also be transformative, just like the wealthy zardozi ceiling at vogue model Divani’s New Delhi retailer, interwoven with semi-precious stones and 9 tonnes of shimmering gold thread. Tarun Tahiliani’s Bengaluru retailer, which opened doorways in December 2022, attracts footfalls so far for a singular wall that reinvents the trompe-l’œil: a tree-of-life wallpaper dropped at life by wealthy couture strategies resembling intricate embroidery, painstakingly crafted by karigars from Lucknow and New Delhi — as an ode to his unwavering dedication to craftsmanship.
The new Indian retail is as a lot about how one thing is bought as what’s bought. The retailer will not be the backdrop, it’s the protagonist.
An architect-turned-journalist, the author hopes her ardour for storytelling drives an incisive cultural commentary.
Published – June 16, 2025 11:11 am IST
