The Old Curiosity Shop: From ceramics to coffee tables, Kiran Salaskar's showroom, Designscape, has it all. Nepeansea Road is fast becoming the Bond Street of Mumbai. After Krishna Mehta's boutique, there was the Beautiful Boulevard, and you now have Designscape. The brainchild of 22-year-old Kiran Salaskar, this boutique, as the name suggests, is a one-stop shop for furniture. Passionate about design even when he was at Sydenham College, Kiran was always poring over interior design magazines. And this interest grew into a calling when he quit his job at Kotak Mahindra. Tired of number crunching, Kiran moved his cars out of his 1,350 square feet garage and set up shop. Armed with a penchant for furniture but no formal training, Kiran started out by stocking a wide range of designers, including Jamini Aluwalia. Six months later, he picks and chooses designers and has started concentrating on in-house design. He hunts around for old furniture which he restores, sticking largely to the colonial period. With a price range of Rs 325 for a photo frame to Rs 12,000 for a mirror, you can find chairs by Anuraj Kanoria, metal work by Rajiv Patel, Shilpa Kalonjee and Nutam as well as ceramics by Colour of the Earth. Kiran will also take orders to adapt designs to suit your taste and wallet.Testimony to his growing success is his list of regulars. Soni Razdan -Bhatt, Sabira Merchant and Poonam Soni swear by Designscape. And interior designers such as Simone Dubash, Hafeez Contractor and Noshir Talati have shown interest in his work. Judging by the rave reviews in his suggestion book, he seems to have customers for life.Kiran believes his USP is that he is "different" in a world cluttered with me-toos. He regularly checks what other stores stock and keeps changing his inventory. He would like to expand into the field of interiors and dreams of decorating an entire flat.Kiran has also come up with an unusual idea to increase traffic to his store. He plans to rent out the front portion of the shop to better known furniture designers to lure customers into his shop. Like most 22-year olds he seems over-enthusiastic about work, but is also realistic about his ambitions. He acknowledges that expansion will take time. "I have grown up a lot since the store first opened," says Kiran. And he knows that like any piece of furniture, the shop too will grow chip by chip.
