Tahir Sultan, the Jaipur-based designer, brought his concept store, Makaan, to life on the heels of Covid. “When I first came upon the space, it had seen better days. There was something about it that seemed improbable,” recalls the Kuwait-born entrepreneur, “but not so improbable that I couldn’t make it work.”
Makaan began as a novelty store, as a shopfront for fashion towels, shawls, and beautiful antiques. Then it metamorphosed into an interior concept store with rare curiosities such as tribal masks, Naga stools, and 200-year-old urns originally used on trade routes. Today, it assumes a third avatar, with a chapel room for carpets and an ikat room for cushions and lamps, amongst other equally charming treasures. In addition to staying true to its predecessors, it also serves as an art gallery, a fashion boutique, and an antique house, and enjoys a clientele of discerning designers and architects around the world. Still, this may not be its last incarnation. “It’s always a work in progress,” shares Sultan, who also runs a small culinary empire. “I’m always after something new. But one thing is certain: I am selective about what I source and only buy things I might keep in my own home.”
The store is as whimsical as the objects that inhabit it. Old rusted sewage pipes—found and saved several years ago—masquerade as art installations beside artisanal clay pots of Sultan’s own design. Cardboard boxes and bamboo laddersdisplay artwork and vases. Old boxes of incense find new life as pedestals. “People come to Makaan for the experience,” reflects Sultan, who refreshed the aesthetic lexicon last year to reveal its most soigné identity yet: think triple-height ceilings, black stone bathrooms, and grey and white hand-trowelled walls.
Forty per cent of the pieces on display, including the life-size black metal elephant at the entrance—which he fell in love with and bought for good luck— aren’t for sale, although Sultan will have you pose with the mammoth and give you a Polaroid print as a parting gift. Also reserved for window shopping is an old post office desk that he painstakingly procured from a vintage dealer. “If I sell everything, people won’t get a real sense of the sort of items I can procure for their homes or hotels,” he says. The merchandise is divided into sections for fashion, art, artisanal objects, lighting, and rugs. As he puts it, “It’s a quirky design hub for everything.”
For someone who enjoys taking the path less travelled, it comes as no surprise that Sultan has a homeware brand up his sleeve. Christened the Jaipur Jungle collection, the label will encompass made-to-order vases, lamps, lampshades, candle holders, bed linens, napkins, placements, and kaleidoscopic objects which, he hopes, “will plug gaps in people’s aesthetic vocabulary”. Other developments in the offing include a cafe, which he plans to open in September on Makaan’s open rooftop, and a website, slated to go live in July.
No two trips to Makaan, not least a month apart, are the same. For example, neither the children’s metal beds from the 1920s—that now occupy the lower floor—were there a fortnight ago nor, for that matter, the peacock-shaped teapot or the beautiful white wooden lion. The brass baltis that Sultan has reimagined as ice buckets are also new arrivals. “I go back and forth between antiques and the crafts of today,” he says of the idiosyncratic assortment, which includes ikat blinds, Chinese bowls, Naga tables, beaded art made from old Gujarati skirt borders, delicate evil eyes, lace bookmarks from Sri Lanka, and hand-woven pouches and wallets, among many other novelties.
Sultan isn’t afraid to reinvent the wheel or, in this case, the craft. He routinely works with NGOs and artisanal communities to create new products in new ways. One case in point is his recent pair of collaborations with Artisan:re, a farm-to-fabric women’s collective, and Pure Hands by Ankuri, a Dehradun-based nonprofit that trains women in knitting, through which he was able to create a larger-than-life knitwear installation for his solo exhibition last year (the piece now hangs in the fashion room). He also engages with Gond artisans to create characterful dolls and decorative ceramic eggs.
As for what the future holds, Sultan doesn’t quite know, and he prefers it that way. One thing on his wish list, however, is seeing glimmers of Makaan in other stores and cities in the way of pop-ups and booths. “There was a time when no one knew what a Naga grain table looked like. Now, they’re everywhere, and an original is almost impossible to source. There’s a palpable explosion of interest all over the world. I’d like to keep that going.”
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