Bharat Floorings & Tiles’ new Andheri store crafted as a design hub

As part of the their 100^th-anniversary celebrations this year, Bharat Floorings & Tiles has announced the launch of their brand new design hub in Andheri (W), Mumbai. The new store has been conceptualised and designed by Ayaz and Zameer Basrai, Akash Tawde and Janvi Dedhia of The Busride Design Studio, who have been working closely with BFT since their very first project.

Speaking about the new store in Andheri (W), Firdaus Variava – Owner, Bharat Floorings & Tiles, says, “Our new store in Andheri is ground-breaking, with magnificent terrazzo sculptures and features beautiful designs being projection-mapped onto the surfaces of the sculptures. In addition to our tiles and floorings, it also showcases the latest collections of our lifestyle products, including carpets, lamps, and mirrors.”

“Also, one of the key differentiators of the Andheri space will be how it communicates itself. We have deliberately tried to ensure that it does not get slotted as a ‘Tile Showroom’ as we feel that it has potential to be a cultural venue, a spot for designers and architects to come to and get inspired,”  he adds.

“At the outset, when The Busride Design Studio team began thinking about what the Andheri store should be all about, they decided to start at the very core of BFT’s product. At their core, BFT tiles are pixels in space, out of which hundreds of permutations and combinations emerge, give their amazing range of colours, grain sizes, designs and patterns. This initial idea got the BDS team thinking about how they could make this world of colour, pattern, heritage, storytelling and Indo-philia completely immersive, to be experienced in a fundamentally different way from a static tile display,” says the company statement.

As it informs, the idea for the store was to present a ‘world of BFT’, where customers and guests could be a part of the store and its story in a visceral way, interacting with iconic century-old designs in a new and playful way.

Speaking about the idea for the design of the new BFT store, Ayaz and Zameer Basrai – Co-Founders, The Busride Design Studio, add,“By conceiving of a digitally augmented store, we're excited about the possibilities this could open up for the future of stores, where retail environments become hubs for culture, storytelling and celebrating the legacy of brands like BFT, rather than being static venues for more transactional interactions. We hope this fun experiment creates a high energy venue for all the fun stuff that BFT gets up to, and helps ‘cement’ its place amongst the architecture, construction and design community.”