Picture this: cosy evenings with the family. To set the mood for a relaxed time, you turn on your lamp. The smell of the scented candle you light wafts through the house. You crack open the wooden box full of childhood games. Every product from Sthalam evokes a sense of nostalgia and allows you to enjoy the small moments in life.
Anitha Mohan, a practising architect, channelled her architectural prowess into Sthalam, a brand that sells premium-quality home decor. The name translates to ‘space’ or ‘land’, and is symbolic of her career. “When we work on a site or a house, we’re usually surrounded by emptiness. Empty areas, empty walls; there’s nothing very interesting in the market to fill these spaces. There’s nothing there that tells a story or connects the design with the space. We used to have to buy random things to accessorise the place, so we thought we would start our own home decor brand,” Anitha explains. She also runs a design studio called Wood Ink and has a restaurant/concept store called Kraft, where all the decor is from Sthalam.
The brand does extensive R&D and creates timeless, unique pieces. “We take a lot of inspiration from our heritage; South Indian heritage especially, seeing how it is not depicted much outside. Our brand is a space that ties modern thinking and modern design with a touch of tradition and heritage. It falls in the middle, where even in a modern, contemporary house you can put up one of our products, and it won’t feel out of place. It will fit right in,” she smiles.
When Sthalam launched three years ago, the team wanted to position themselves as a premium brand. “The pieces that we sell mostly don’t have parallels in the market. They’re very unique by themselves. Of course, there will be some degree of overlapping, but you won’t be able to find the exact products. We realised early on that there was a huge demand for gifting, so we organically fit into that space and received a lot of gift orders. We focused a lot on that for the first one and a half years, and then moved more into the e-commerce space. We still do corporate gifting and hampers when the need arises,” Anitha describes the brand’s journey.
When asked about where she would like to see Sthalam in the future, she says, “We think there’s great potential for us to position ourselves well in the market. In the general market and the export market as well, there is a big gap in the representation of South India. The world knows India only as Jaipur or Rajasthan; those are the main products that reach most parts of the world. Not many products go out of South India to be marketed as innately Indian handicrafts. We have such a wide variety of art forms in the South, but none of them have reached anywhere in the world.”
Anitha mentions that a lot of other home decor brands outsource their products from North India, but at Sthalam, everything is designed and manufactured in-house. They have a factory and can make what they want, any time they want.
“Since we do a lot of architecture projects, we have a good idea of what products would fill the spaces well and what gaps exist in the market. We decide on what products to make for the brand based on that. By default, we get to design a lot of decor that is part of the projects that we work on. We are fortunate enough to have in-house manufacturing, so the process and turnaround time are quick. We can easily execute our ideas, design a lot of products, and make samples, so if something doesn’t work out, we can always stop. Usually, for brands, designing and manufacturing are the biggest challenges, because they are separate processes. One has to understand the other and work in tandem, and then there’s the question of the cost, especially when it comes to intricate designs. For us, it’s easy to understand and convert our designs to reality without much of a hassle,” she explains.
When asked about the products they design and how they become meaningful rather than simply beautiful to look at, Anitha says they should have a story, connecting them to the user in some way. A lot of motifs that they pick have a backstory to them. If it’s a game, the story is to get the family together, connecting through a fun activity. A throwback to earlier times, in a way. Now, since everything is on the phone, opening up a nice wooden box with games that you used to play as a child is a tangible memory to reconnect with.
Why did she pick small, everyday rituals to focus on? “It’s all a part of our daily lives, right? We just don’t choose to enhance these moments. Most people probably light a lamp every day at some point; it’s a part of our daily routine. We’re trying to make these moments more special. A lot of people take the extra step and effort to make what they do daily meaningful, and we would love to be a part of that by creating products that add an extra touch of beauty,” she concludes.
Sthalam has a myriad of beautiful, elegant products that will suit all your home decor needs—lights, wall decor, trays and coasters, and games.
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