EPISODE Powai
A modern gymkhana condensed into one Powai room.
EPISODE Powai marks the brand's arrival in Bombay, dropped into one of the most competitive hospitality landscapes in the city. Powai, the planned lakeside district around Hiranandani, is dense with restaurants and bars fighting for the same crowd, and the design had to announce itself the moment you walked in. Where a club of this kind might normally spread across a suite of rooms, here the entire program is compressed into a single grand volume of roughly six thousand square feet: ballroom, lounge, and bar gathered into one continuous, immersive space organized around a single powerful center.
That center is a triangular planter at the very heart of the room, a raised island of greenery around which the whole space turns. The DJ booth sits just off the planter at dead center, booth-lined ceilings fold down along either side, and the plan reads as one gesture: a green core, an energetic ring, and a soft perimeter of seating oriented back toward the charged middle.
The signature move is written in marble. A local black-and-white marble was cut into slender fluted staves and split, one after another, to open out a mirrored, repeating figure, deployed across the walls like a giant material tattoo and framed top and bottom by continuous timber molding. Underfoot, the same marble is laid as a concentric inlay that reads almost as graphic design; overhead, the ceiling steps in charred timber, burnt and half-burnt woods pressing a dark lid over the pale marble and the green core.
The intensity peaks at the taproom, where a vast stainless-steel sheet carries the fluted motif onward in black, green, and white marble. If the club draws on the old gymkhana, the members' room and its ceremony, it does so entirely through material rather than ornament: one room, one strong center, worked hard enough to hold its own in the most demanding corner of the city.
Design
Making