Another room with a view

Kiran Rao slowly sips on a glass of water as she waits inside the seemingly tranquil Wild Garden café at Amethyst. On a balmy October evening, the place is filled with notes of pleasant jazz floating above and the distinct hum of conversations below.

The launch of the newest Amrapali and The Amethyst Room on Khader Nawaz Khan Road will mark the presence of this lifestyle space’s third location in the city. The new store, which doesn’t have a café (“Nungambakkam has plenty of cafés”), came about when Kiran felt the time was right for a standalone boutique, and so she finally settled upon this place. The Amethyst Room will also exhibit clothes, gold and silver jewellery and more.

Kiran’s brainchild Amethyst, when it first opened its doors in Gopalapuram 15 years ago, was an old zamindari bungalow. It was later restored by Kiran, who was on the lookout for a small space to showcase “interesting and affordable jewellery. I was looking at something similar to the mada veedhi shops in Mylapore, when I came across this place — it was elastic and magical. Since I’m one of those ‘follow the rabbit’ people, I thought why not,” Kiran remarks. With a self-confessed passion for jewellery, Kiran draws her experience for retail from the many years she worked in the industry and in galleries in London, and from an “ad hoc continuous retail exposure”.

A student of Indian history and anthropology, Kiran says that it helped her develop an “unconventional view of retail”, in that she sees people “as artists rather than magpies” and not as “fashion victims”. She finds them to be greatly “too complex and genuinely interesting”.

In 2010, Amethyst moved from Gopalapuram to a new restoration project in Royapettah — a granary warehouse on Whites Road. “It was a simple box-like structure; it was not glamorous at all,” Kiran says, adding, “Anything can be made beautiful. It was a very good location and it offered me a chance to accommodate all the other things that I was already doing, such as preserving Nature, restoring heritage structures... There’s a lot of 1950s detailing in this building, if you notice carefully,” Kiran says.

Amethyst has now become a sort of a culture hub — it’s where some of the city’s intelligentsia and the glitterati gather for book launches, boutique showcases and author rendezvous. It’s also where the proletarians (if you please) sometimes come to think and relax amidst the chic-posh surroundings. Point out that she has eclectic taste, and Kiran more than readily agrees.

“I knew the ropes; I knew what would work. I’m my own interior designer. I had the space, and intuitively, I saw what it told me.” This was how the café (Wild Garden), the flower shop (Bloom), the fashion and accessories store (Upstairs), and the event and exhibition space (The Folly) at Amethyst came about. “There already was space in the garden; we enlarged it and that’s how The Folly happened,” Kiran says.

Apart from the store in Royapettah and the one on Chamiers Road (Chamiers), Kiran has also restored La Maison Rose in Puducherry. With its signature rose-pink walls, a huge atrium, and breezy evening engagements, the colonial-style restaurant has all the markings of the Amethyst at home. It’s a theme that runs across her properties and one that Kiran strongly believes in. Green. “I definitely have a missionary zeal for green; I love natural-looking gardens. That’s how the name ‘Wild Garden’ evolved — the name just suggested itself.”

Born to a European mother and an Indian father, and having studied in Church Park, Kiran is an out-an-out Chennai girl. But she does acknowledge the influence that being abroad gave her in setting up Amethyst. “It brought a remembered past to this place — a slower, relaxed pace of life, it helped me create an ambience as you slow down,” she says, as she waxes eloquent about life in general. “You’re always looking for contradictions, for luxurious beautiful things that provide escapism from the mundane and the ever practical.” It’s what she envisions Amethyst to reflect — “a space where people can express themselves; where people can sit for hours and not be trailed or badgered.”

So what does it take to be as successful as her? Well, for one, Kiran says that her trick is to view everything she does as separate businesses — “I’m running several businesses, not the one” — and that there’s only one lifetime so it’s better to not be typecast as someone or something.

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