About Peacock Life by Shabnam Gupta

About

India’s maximalist house

Peacock Life is a luxury furniture and decor house founded in Mumbai in 2010 by the interior designer Shabnam Gupta. Nearly everything it sells is handcrafted to order by its own karigars, in its own workshop, in the size and the cloth the customer chooses.

Design is for everyone.

That belief is where the company started, and it is still the most useful thing to know about it. Maximalism at Peacock Life is not decoration piled up for effect — it is the conviction that a home should look like the people in it, and that colour, pattern, carving and craft are how a room tells you who lives there. A matched set from a catalogue cannot do that. A collected room can.

Two practices, one hand

Shabnam Gupta founded the design studio The Orange Lane in 2003, and has since worked across residential, hospitality and retail interiors in India. Peacock Life came seven years later, and it came out of a practical problem: the pieces her projects needed did not exist, so she had them made. The furniture house and the design studio still work as one — the same drawings, the same workshop, the same people.

Today that means two things you can buy. A single piece, made to order and delivered to your door. Or the whole room, designed and built by the studio. Both are on the same page at interior design services.

Made, not sourced

We are not importers. Every piece begins as a working drawing in the Mumbai studio, is set out at full size before a length of timber is cut, and is built and upholstered in our own workshop. Frames are seasoned hardwood, Burma teak where the piece calls for it, chosen because it holds its shape through a Mumbai monsoon and a Delhi summer.

Most furniture takes six weeks from order to delivery. Fabric up to ₹1,000 a metre is included in the price, anything above that is billed as per actuals and confirmed before we cut, and you are welcome to send your own cloth. If you want a piece longer, deeper, darker or in a different wood, the studio will price it before any work starts.

You can follow one sofa all the way from the first drawing to the crate it travels in on How it is made.

What we make

• Upholstered furniture — sofas, armchairs, beds, benches, ottomans
• Case goods — dining tables, consoles, sideboards, bar cabinets, chests
• Lighting, mirrors and wall art
• Decor, serveware and collected artefacts
• Full interior design, from design only to design and build

Where to find us

Our studio is in Andheri West, Mumbai, and Peacock Life by the Countryside sits about ninety minutes out of the city near Karjat, where the collection is laid out across a farmhouse rather than a shop floor. Addresses and directions are on the store locator. We deliver across India, and our own team places the piece in the room rather than leaving it in the lobby.

In the press

Shabnam Gupta’s work and the Peacock Life collection have been published by, among others:

• Elle Decor India — on the Peacock Life flagship store
• Elle Decor India — on Peacock Life by the Countryside, Karjat
• Elle Decor India — on an Alibaug farmhouse
• Design Pataki — on a Mumbai duplex
• Outlook Luxe — a profile of the designer