Stay a little longer

Peacock Life by the Countryside in Karjat is a maximalist design haven by Shabnam Gupta you’ll wish you could move into!

06 Jun 2025

Chiransha Prasad

Far away from Mumbai’s dust and grime, Peacock Life by the Countryside is Shabnam Gupta’s maddeningly gorgeous, colourful world — and we want to live in it. Desperately so.

The space abounds in elements found quite infrequently in the modern world (read: Mumbai). Take, for instance, the north-facing courtyards, filled with Karjat’s lush greens, sunlight and charpoys to sit aplenty. Then you have the novelties. Ancient Karaikudi pillars uphold an English oakwood mezzanine indoors, with decorative animal sculptures guarding a delectable spread of design. Outside, two 30 ft tall walls sandwich a collection of outdoor furniture and knick-knacks for balconies, terraces and gardens, especially for those from outside Maximum City.

All-in-all, the evidence may point to the farmhouse-cum-design gallery being yet another maximalist retail space. But surrounded by the rolling hills, Peacock Life by the Countryside is a detour designed to make you forget the outside world exists. And it’s quite adept at it!

“I think design is not about aesthetics. I think it is about how it can make you feel.” — Shabnam Gupta

A portal amidst the hills

It’s tough to pin all creations within the space to definite categories. Stumble in, and you may find yourself walking away with a table runner for your next soiree, a planter for your balcony, or even lugging away an intricately carved wooden cabinet! The possibilities are endless, and so were Shabnam’s points of inspiration for building the space. But central to it all is a distinct memory. “I remember the first time I had entered Paradise Road in Sri Lanka, all wide-eyed at the sight of its pristine white, very vernacular architectural form. It was the slow flow of time, the architecture and the old Bawa office, which is now the Paradise Road cafe. That entire architecture, that sense of lingering, is what stayed with me,” avers the designer.

But for anyone familiar with Shabnam’s oeuvre, her love for colour is paramount to her design practice. She acknowledges the same, laughing, “The designer in me was conflicted with the entrepreneur in me because I see things in colour.” But just in case the store’s bare white facade makes you question whether you’re at the right place from a distance, drive closer and you’ll see the blue and green tiles dotting the structure. A brilliant blue feature wall ducks underneath the mammoth trees, a dead giveaway of the kaleidoscopic burst of colours that await inside.

The art of lingering

Maximalism demands attention. It is not an easy thing to dismiss, nor an easy art form to replicate. But in Karjat, visitors will be able to give Shabnam’s creations their due diligence, the time that they deserve — a befitting shrine to her more-is-perfect genius.

There are plenty of material reasons to linger in the space. But what may catch you off guard is its immaterial beauty: the way the sun catches the light in a particular spot, the soft gurgle of the fountain in the courtyard. The latter is an important reason why Shabnam chose to build a portal to her design world from the ground up here, surrounded by rolling hills as far as the eye can see. As she quips, “In a city like Bombay, you can only dream of a courtyard.” But here, you’ll find them aplenty.

Peacock Life by the Countryside is not an attempt at creating a picture-perfect backdrop, or an experiential centre designed to make you shop till you drop. Between its eclectic bones and green, green exteriors, it is made to make you stay longer than you should. It is this very intent that defines Shabnam’s favourite design element in the space — an element that she had little hand in creating. “We put charpoys under the big trees. You have to go and lie down on that charpoy, the one that’s between three trees. Lie down, and all that you’ll see is the web of all the branches above, and it’s so therapeutic. So beautiful.”