Sandeep Khosla On Mubarak Baug, And Forty Years Of Living The Maximal Dream

Sandeep Khosla was born in Kapurthala, Punjab, and spent part of his teenage years in Chand Tara Kothi, a house given to his refugee grandparents after Partition, one he later lost when his family's fortunes turned. Nearly four decades later, that memory of a house name became the name of a garden of fantasy: Mubarak Baug, the flagship space of A Wonder Room, the interior design and objets d'art venture Khosla runs alongside his partner of almost forty years, Abu Jani. Housed within the Framjee Cowasjee Institute, opposite Metro Cinema in Marine Lines, Mumbai, Mubarak Bagh sits inside a heritage building the duo describe as their playground. "India is so fantastic to be born in, and so fantastic to create," Khosla says. "But the tragedy is we all look down on India, for some reason... we are so busy promoting various cultures that we have forgotten our own culture."

Walking guests through the space himself, Khosla describes it as filled with stories. A wall mural by artist Shayan Shivan depicts the legend of Salim Chishti and Fatehpur Sikri, how Emperor Akbar received a son through a wish made at the Dargah, tied with a thread untied only once fulfilled. A nearly thirty-year-old miniature textile piece sits embroidered with glass in the Anantya Bhakti tradition, worn deliberately on the inside of a garment so that anyone leaving the store carries only good vibes home. A composite material resembling bamboo forms a floating city installed on the ceiling downstairs, and around 300 vintage Gujarati window frames, collected from Vivek Sahni's store Vayu, appear throughout, though Khosla notes the collection actually runs closer to 600 pieces. In place of artificial flowers, the space uses Chola, a Bengali craft tied to Durga Puja, made from a leaf that grows underwater, brought up and shaped almost exclusively by artisans from Bengal.

Look closely at the flowers and the detail is easy to miss: red glass bangles, worked directly into the arrangements. Khosla and Jani have spent four decades dressing India's brides, and even in a space with no clothing in it at all, that instinct hasn't gone anywhere, it has simply moved into the florals.

Robb Report India spoke with Khosla about turning forty years of instinct into an open door.

SK: Here, we had this ginormous space and called it Mubarak Baug, also because I lived as a child in Mubarak Manzil in Kapurthala, given to my grandparents as refugees from Pakistan. It was known as Chand Tara Kothi, with a half-crescent moon and a star on it. It was magical, gardens all around, though we eventually went bust and had to sell it. But the word Mubarak is welcoming and all-encompassing. Let's create a fantastical world people cannot even imagine when they walk in.

The 50 people who visited, maybe 100 now, have all been gobsmacked. They ask what imagination, what guts, allowed us to create this. There is the sheer audacity of the life-size birds, this whole garden, two and a half thousand kilos of grass just on those screens. Then there's the floating city downstairs, an installation using a material made to resemble bamboo, which we've used as racks. We got this heritage site, and it was literally our playground. This is also the first time it isn't a private space. You can come in and understand where the philosophy of Abu Jani starts from, whether clothes or interiors. Literally, it's madness.

SK: We create everything in our life, clothes or interiors, for Abu and me first. It's what we love to do. Whether it turns into a showroom or somebody's home, it's about living our fantasies out through people who trust us. For Mubarak Baug, people come and want to experience the interior separately, then the clothes separately, otherwise it's too overwhelming. We've never been pushy sellers, even with clothes. You walk around, you like something, you pick it up, you come back. There's nothing like, you must go now. It's just like our home. Every time people come and sit, they sit on the right, look at the left; next time, the left. We create these spaces to satisfy us first, and then everybody else.