Intuitive intention

EDIDA-winner Vaishali Kamdar redesigns FCML’s store in Mumbai

04 Sep 2025

In the hierarchy of a home, a bathroom usually falls somewhere between an afterthought and a secret to be swept under the rug. But during the course of your life, you spend about 800 days inside them, just shy of three years. Why don’t our absolution spaces solicit more attention, especially from designers? FCML attempts to change the narrative. In 2014, they brought on board EDIDA-winner Vaishali Kamdar to bring their Mumbai outpost to life. Spanning 10,000 sq ft, over two floors, the store that was once ahead of its time, continues to be a design destination that’s anything but ordinary. “This is one of my favourite projects. I don’t think that at that time, I had ever had this kind of scale to play with. I really enjoyed the volume of the industrial shell and the light brought in by the trusses,” says Vaishali alongside designers Pranshu Parmar and Akshat Tripathi who worked with her on the project.

“People return time and again for the FCML store’s creative interpretations, design inspiration and for a glimpse of how their own spaces might be envisioned. Bathrooms don’t need to look like bathrooms”

Vaishali Kamdar

Through the years, her eponymous studio Vaishali Kamdar Associates based in Gurugram has redone multiple aspects of the FCML store, but this time the scope of the overhaul was larger. “We worked with the outline of what we had previously designed and tried creating something fresh and new with it,” she tells us. The most overarching transformation is of the rear space previously dedicated to displaying tiles.

Today, it’s transformed with wooden slatted screens, bespoke vanities resting on antiques and whimsical objects and art that line the walls. Bringing together renowned names like Mahendra Doshi, Ashiesh Shah and Ravi Vazirani, the outpost becomes a repository of multivalent ideas. No two displays are alike, just like no two tastes.

Vaishali notes, “A lot of people tell me that what they love about the FCML store is the overall experience. They return time and again for its creative interpretations, design inspiration and to offer their clients a glimpse of how their spaces might be envisioned. Bathrooms don’t need to look like bathrooms.”

Perhaps reflecting Vaishali’s intuitive design approach, the space escapes superfluity, almost having a mind of its own. To explain why each detail is crafted the way it is would be unfair to the process. As the adage by William Morris goes, have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. It’s perhaps what pushes design’s ability to rethink even the most mundane spaces. An unending intentional pursuit of beauty.