Modern Marvels

Gulmohar Lane will add just the perfect accoutrements for your home

Jaipur has slowly but surely become a hot spot for design mavens. When Saurabh Ailawadi and Shweta Mewara set up Gulmohar Lane as an online portal to buy top-notch, impeccably designed furniture, it instantly piqued our fancy. Before delving into the brand, we asked them how they decided the company’s cool name. “The name Gulmohar Lane takes us to beautiful lanes, covered with trees on both sides. A lane with a row of charming homes, put together with a lot of personal love and care,” says Saurabh, adding, “In a way, ‘Gulmohar’ expresses a strong India connect while ‘Lane’ gives it a contemporary touch; a name that breathes easy yet exudes rich aesthetics.”

The company’s handcrafted collections offer a wide range of natural fabric and leather upholstered sofas, coffee tables and home products. “At Gulmohar Lane, we take great pride in design and hand-craftsmanship of our products. Our in-house designers create time-honed designs. The craftsmen, some of them even from the fourth generations of furniture and sofa karigars, have the skillset to transform these designs into timeless products,” explains Saurabh.

The company’s core desire is to make beautiful and rich aesthetics approachable to a larger section. But what sets the brand apart from the rest is the extremely competitive pricing. “We feel that great aesthetics should become accessible to the people who appreciate design and quality at the same time,” says the designer.

While Shweta is a fashion designer by education, Saurabh, a NIFT alumnus, has a background in visual merchandising. Both shared this passion for creating and providing furniture options that breathe easy and exude strong aesthetics to fill the gap they saw in the Indian market. “We moved to Jaipur in 2013 and did extensive research for almost a year before setting up our workshop/ production facility. We worked with local artisans, made some international visits and went through a few trainings with some companies in Italy to find out what goes into making the perfect sofa,” says Saurabh.

The website went live on February 14 this year. “As a brand, we should inspire our customers to make a home that reflects their personality and aesthetics. Your home should be the most comfortable place for you and it’s rightly said that the things we love always tell a story and reflect who we are,” he says.

Gulmohar Lane believes in combining outstanding quality with astonishing value, offering carefully curated home products. Pairing timeless elements with fresh twists, each item is designed to enhance a room, or inspire a memorable experience. “We celebrate the beauty of natural materials that are crafted into simple, one-of-a-kind shapes and silhouettes. Whether it’s our fabrics made out of natural yarns such as linen and cotton (some of them especially handwoven) or our furniture pieces, anything natural excites us,” explains Saurabh.

Gulmohar Lane also provides easy customisation options where the customer can choose size, fabric, and fillers. “Every season, the company works on a new palette to provide the right mix of basic as well as trend-based colours and shapes to customers. Once the shapes are finalised, we start designing and sampling our textiles, he says, adding, “Working with natural fibre blends has its own set of challenges. Therefore, we do extensive research for creating Smart Fabric Finishes such as Hydro-phobic, Oleo-phobic, Stain repellent and Fire Retardant properties. We offer these finishes as ‘add-ons’ on our website.”  The idea is to empower the customer to make the right choice depending on their requirements. Once the products are uploaded on the website, depending on their categories the delivery time varies from seven (for lighting, scatter cushions etc.) to 45 days (in case of upholstered products).

Future projects? The company is launching lighting solutions and scatter pillows soon. “We are also working on a line of hand-tufted beds and sofa-cum-beds as we are also getting a huge demand for these products,” says Saurabh, who counts Timoth Oulton, Laura Ashley and Charles & Ray Eames as inspirations. We ask him if Gulmohar Lane will translate its designs into a physical store space as well. “We believe in the process of organic growth. Our focus right now is to provide the best product and shopping experience to our customers through visualisations and providing as many details about the product as possible. Ideally we would want to open brick and mortar stores as well in major cities for our customers to touch and feel the products. As of now we ship samples of our fabrics to our customers, so that they could get the feel of it.” Prices start at Rs 3,900 for a metal chair and can go up to Rs 71,000 for custom-made pieces. 

Log on to: www.gulmoharlane.com for more.

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The New Indian Express
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