RR Recommended: The Design Stores, Hotels And Materials Pavitra Rajaram Swears By

Pavitra Rajaram has spent her career teaching Indian interiors to hold colour, craft and history in the same room without any of it feeling forced. A seven-time AD100 honouree who spent 25 years as lead designer at Good Earth before founding her own multidisciplinary practice, Pavitra Rajaram Design, in 2004, she now also serves as Design Director at Asian Paints, where she has worked with designers including Sabyasachi Mukherjee on the Nilaya collections, and as Brand Custodian of the Sarmaya Arts Foundation.

Her practice runs on what she calls Slow Design, the idea of savouring a space rather than devouring it, a sensibility shaped as much by the stores she shops at and the hotels she stays in as by her own projects. Below is her edit of the design stores worth planning a trip around, the hotels she keeps returning to, and the materials she reaches for when a space needs refining.

Hay, Copenhagen

Hay was founded in 2002 by husband-and-wife duo Rolf and Mette Hay, who met while both working at the Danish furniture company Gubi, alongside a third co-founder, Bestseller founder Troels Holch Povlsen, with a founding brief to make good, contemporary design accessible rather than exclusive. The brand introduced its first collection at the Cologne furniture fair in January 2003, opened its first standalone shop on Pilestræde in central Copenhagen the following year, and now runs its flagship, Hay House, from a historic 1896 building nearby, a space the founders describe as their own living canvas for new ideas. Hay arrived in the American market in 2015 through, fittingly, the MoMA Design Store in New York, and in 2018 Herman Miller took a 33 percent stake in the brand for USD 66 million. For Rajaram, it is a non-negotiable stop. "Hay Design in Copenhagen, I would say always, always," she says.

MoMA Design Store, New York City

The Museum of Modern Art opened its first retail counter in 1939, and had already established the first architecture and design department of any art museum seven years earlier, in 1932, under founding curator Philip Johnson, a curatorial commitment that still shapes what makes it onto the shelves of the Design Store today. Its flagship on 53rd Street, directly across from the museum, opened in 1989, with a SoHo outpost following in 2001 and a Tokyo store in 2007; the SoHo location underwent a full ground-up redesign by architecture firm Peterson Rich Office and reopened in September 2025, with a mural by artist Nina Chanel Abney now spanning its north wall. Every product is vetted by museum curators, which is what separates it, in Rajaram's telling, from an ordinary gift shop.

Muji, Ginza, Tokyo

Muji began in December 1980 as a 40-product private label of the Japanese supermarket chain Seiyu, proposed by Seiyu Ryutsu Group president Seiji Tsutsumi and built on a philosophy of quiet, unbranded quality rather than logos or excess; its first standalone store opened in Aoyama, Tokyo, in 1983. Its Ginza flagship, opened on April 4, 2019, across ten floors and a basement, is the largest Muji store in the world and includes Atelier Muji, a gallery, library and salon devoted to craftsmanship and design, along with Muji Hotel Ginza, the brand's first hotel, a 79-room property occupying the building's upper floors. For Rajaram, it is specifically this store, not any Muji, that makes her list. "The third one would be Muji, but in Tokyo," she says.

Three Design Trends Worth Investing In

Rajaram's picks lean toward things that age rather than date. "Textiles, to give your home warmth and character," she says first, followed by art for the walls, with a clear preference for where the trend is currently heading. "Right now the trend is to do more figurative than abstract, which is something that I love." Her third favourite trend is more of an instruction than trend: "A really, really good quality Italian sofa."

The Lodgings at Permit Room, London

Dishoom, the British restaurant group built on Bombay's Irani café culture, opened its first stay above its Permit Room outpost on Portobello Road in May 2025, in a building that had earlier served as the Colville Hotel in the 1860s and, later, an Irish and West Indian pub. The two-bedroom flat was designed by Laura Newstead of Macaulay Sinclair, with arched windows, parquet floors and reclaimed antique furniture, its interiors and art curated to nod to Kekee Manzil, the storied Bombay home once at the centre of the city's modern art movement, alongside the design languages of two other historic Bombay hotels, Bentley's and the Sea Green. The art throughout, including work by Maya Varadaraj, Mustafa Mohsin and Ahsan Javaid, was curated in partnership with Rajiv Menon Contemporary, the Los Angeles gallery devoted to South Asian and diaspora artists, run by Rajiv Menon himself. Rajaram counts it among her top three design-forward hotels in the world, and the personal connection is part of why: the art, she notes, was curated by her friend.

SoprArno Suites, Florence

Opened in the Oltrarno district by lawyer-turned-hotelier Matteo Perduca, calligrapher Betty Soldi and architect Francesco Maestrelli, SoprArno Suites occupies a 16th-century building on Via Maggio, a short walk from the Ponte Vecchio, that had previously housed the offices of an Italian newspaper before its conversion. Its dozen or so rooms are individually decorated with commissioned textiles, leatherwork, ceramics and salvaged antique furniture sourced through the founders' own connections in Florence's art and design world, alongside original frescoed ceilings preserved from the building's earlier life. No two of its rooms look alike. For Rajaram, that is precisely the point. "Each room is different and has the most beautiful textiles and objects," she says, "and it's like living in someone's home."

Dar Es Salaam, Nigeen Lake, Kashmir

The only hotel on the quieter, less-trafficked Nigeen Lake in Srinagar, Dar Es Salaam began life over a century ago as a private stately home before its conversion into a boutique hotel, its rooms filled with antique furniture and objets d'art and its gardens running down to the lake's edge, roughly seven kilometres from the centre of the city. It is Rajaram's personal favourite of the three, and the name, she says, carries its own story: the property is named Dar Es Salaam because the couple who ran it first met in the Tanzanian city of that name. "It's a beautiful, beautiful space," she says. "Those are my three."

The Materials That Refine a Space

Rajaram's answer here comes down to three, each doing a different job. Stone, first, because it ages so beautifully that she always keeps some element of it in a space. Ceramic next, for the colour, form and proportion it brings. And wood last, for a kind of warmth she says can never be replaced by anything else.