Pepper House design store

Do more with less.

How do you design for a retail store that is in a 14th Century charming building? By enhancing what was!

Pepper House, a permanent venue of the internationally acclaimed Kochi Muziris Biennale in Mattanchery. today it is a point for art and culture in the city. The brief was to refurbish an existing store inside Pepper House into a Design store which would host collections of Indian lifestyle brands and unique products by artists from across the country.

The design interventions were deliberately kept minimal, creating display spaces which were unobtrusive. Since the products were ever changing a racking system was devised to adapt into shelves, hooks, or hanging rods. Over the years a previous owner had painted the ceiling/floor above orange!
Painstakingly we scraped the orange and revived the natural wood. The space came alive!
All it needed was modern lighting and the store would be ready. The windows are framed to act as window display.

History:
Pepper House was originally a warehouse for spices, that has now been converted into a cultural center and coffee shop. This two-storied building constructed out of wood, laterite, and lime is a typical example of the design and architecture of traditional warehouses in Kochi. The structure depicts the system of functioning of a traditional warehouse. The warehouse stretches with the Vembanad Lake on the eastern side and the road to the market on the western side. Pepper house has a rectangular open-space or a courtyard in the middle which is surrounded by structures. A tall and wide wooden door on the eastern side of the structure opens to the Vembanad lake, where the Periyar river meets the Arabian Sea. When Pepper House fulfilled the role of a warehouse, boats carrying raw yields of spices from different parts of Kerala sailed through the Periyar, and parked near the warehouse, after which the goods from these boats were unloaded into the warehouse. The goods were then taken into big halls in the building, where they were sorted and processed. On being processed, the goods were kept in the courtyard to dry, after which the goods were stored in sacks as finished products, ready to be traded. The wooden door on the western side of the structure opens to the road which leads to Kochi Spice-Market. Ever since the 14th century, when the progress of trade relations led to the evolution of Kochi as a major port, warehouses and godowns like Pepper House mushroomed at Calvetti, remnants of which are still noticeably around in Calvetti. It was the shift in the market that led to Calvetti losing its prominence, due to which most of the warehouses and godowns around Calvetti fell into disuse. It houses a contemporary visual art reference library, which is free and open to all.