Saniya Kantawala Design Infuses Mumbai Restaurant with Color
When Oye Kake, a restaurant in suburban Mumbai, conceived a six-color branding scheme, the team asked Saniya Kantawala Design a pivotal question: How to incorporate each of the hues, without distracting guests from the traditional Punjabi cuisine?
“Modern Punjab is very colorful,” Kantawala says, “but we go back in time and study the state, it included mud homes and white hand murals across the homes. That’s what we wanted to implement, using those shades and tints.”
A monochromatic palette of highly textured paint, jute, and oak serves as a backdrop throughout the 1,200-square-foot space, with vitrified tile floors and muralled mirrors. An open tandoor, lassi, and kulfi bar joins collections of ceramic and metal vessels.
But what about the half-dozen colors? “Punjab women wear a wedding ornament on their hands called a choora,” Kantawala says of the traditional bangle. “We bound almost 40,000 of them in those colors as a form of an art installation on the ceiling.” Spread across 1,100-square-feet, and fitted with embedded lights, it not only fulfills the colorful brief, but allows the restaurant to glow when night falls.
