Mumbai Taxi Interior

It’s time to reveal our latest project, made in collaboration with Taxi Fabric and Architectural Digest India. Taxi Fabric is a Mumbai-based project which uses the taxi seat covers as a canvas for designers to showcase their work. Through a successful kickstarter campaign they have managed fit around 30 of Mumbai’s taxis and autos with beautiful new interiors, designed by a super talented bunch of artists and designers including Shweta Malhotra, Kunel Gaur, Sameer Kulavoor and NorBlack NorWhite. When Architectural Digest India got involved and asked if we wanted to design one too we jumped at the chance.

Bombay Deco

We were given the brief of Architecture as a theme for the series. All our designs are inspired by  travels, so we drew on the architecture of Mumbai. After Miami, Mumbai has the second largest concentration of Art Deco buildings in the world. We love the bold and expressive style of the era, so created ‘Bombay Deco’ – a celebration of Mumbai’s Art Deco heritage.

As Art Deco was such a colourful movement we thought it would be fun to play with the colours within the taxi and create a gradient effect. We designed the seats for the colours to flow in a rainbow from pink and red on the back seats to orange and yellow in the middle and blue and green in the front.

We looked to incorporate a mix of classic Art Deco motifs like sunbursts, scallops and chevron patterns with Mumbai specific elements, such as the famous Eros Cinema in Churchgate and the New India Assurance building in Fort.

All Taxi Fabric taxis are on the road, so if you’re out and about in Mumbai you might be lucky to get a ride in one!

Check out Architectural Digest magazine for the full story, including the other designers featured; fashion designer Nishish Shah from Shift, Graphic Designer Aniruddh Mehta and photographer Jatin Kampani.

We love collaborations, especially ones as fun as this, so huge thanks to the team at Architectural Digest for asking us to contribute, and also to the  team at Taxi Fabric for all their wonderful work. All photographs with the AD watermark are by Neville Sukhia for Architectural Digest India. All other images are by Siddharth Samant for Taxi Fabric.

If you’d like to collaborate with us or commission us for a project, drop us an email on hello@safomasi.com.