Mahindra & Mahindra Showroom
Workspace Architecture I Worli, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Client Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd
Area 5,000 Sq.ft
Status Completed 2026
Photographer Niveditaa Gupta
Team Vaishali Mangalvedhekar, Pragati Dighe, Aparna Venkatasubramanian, Aarya Chandrasekhar
A Car Showroom for the Contemporary Indian
In India, life is a collective act. Streets are rarely empty, community celebrations spill outward, decisions are seldom solitary, and even the most everyday acts, from eating to shopping, carry a sense of togetherness. This sense of sharedness is a strength that shapes how Indians live and how they occupy space. A marketplace, for Indians, is not only a place of business, but a bustling site where community, ritual, festivities, and business converge. Today, as their aspirations become more global and futuristic, the question is not simply of change, but of continuity. How can design find ground with contemporary sensibilities, without losing this innate desire to gather, to share experiences?
For SJK Architects, this question laid the groundwork for the design of Mahindra & Mahindra’s flagship showroom, spanning 5000 sq ft on the ground floor of Atria Mall in Worli, Mumbai. The showroom sits within a larger landscape of automotive brand retail outlets.
A Space that expresses the brand's evolving, futuristic identity
Over the years, the Mahindra & Mahindra brand and the design of its vehicles have undergone a perceptible shift. Known for their strength and ruggedness, the newer models carry a distinct assurance, defined by sharper, more angular geometries, and a design language that leans towards a more global, forward-looking expression. Through their “Heartcore” philosophy, the company’s designs seek to achieve clarity in their form and nuance in their detailing, signalling a redefinition of what luxury can mean.
When the brand approached SJK Architects, whom they had previously commissioned to create their automobile design studio across two interesting and unique phases of auto styling. The brief extended beyond creating a conventional showroom. It called for a space that could express the brand’s evolving, futuristic identity. The architects went further, choosing to also respond to the inherently social and collective nature of car buying in India.
The challenge lay not only in expressing this shift in identity but in bringing together a range of spatial and emotional demands within a single showroom.
The space needed to accommodate the scale and presence of the vehicles, while also allowing for the human activity of pause and discussion. It also had to support back-of-house operations, each with its own degree of privacy and emotional tone, without fragmenting the overall experience.
It was in navigating this context that the idea of the aangan (courtyard) took shape.
In many traditional Indian homes, the aangan is a central area that connects the different parts of the house. It serves as a shared ground where conversations unfold easily, and many activities overlap. It is both pause and passage. Buying a car in India follows this emotional similarity—families arrive together, spend time in understanding all offerings and then deliberate together. Decision-making happens gradually through constant exchange. As such, the idea of the aangan resonated with the architects and the clients as a tool to recognise an existing behaviour while drawing from cultural memory.
The Aangan: Moving from Transactions to Conversations
The showroom is planned as a single, continuous volume, allowing for clear visibility and movement of cars. Supporting functions, including meeting spaces, accessory retail, and operational areas, are organised towards the far ends without disrupting the customer experience. Emerging from within the core of the space, the aangan, cocooned into the largeness, is designed as the physical and emotional centre of the showroom.
The aangan is defined through a layered envelope of slatted elements, inspired by the jaalis of traditional architecture across various regions of India. The space is designed to feel like a courtyard cafe defined by swirling screens, open enough to maintain visual connection with the larger showroom, yet distinct enough to create a sense of enclosure. Light filters through these slats, blurring the boundary between inside and outside while their curvature subtly reflects the sculpted language of the vehicles.
In contrast to the minimalism of the outer shell, the aangan introduces raw plywood and hand-applied French polish, introducing a distinct tactile richness and warmth. The dialogue between precision and craft—the thoughtfully proportioned and detailed parametric design, paired with artisanal hand polishing and buffing—allows the grains of timber to emerge with depth, infusing a humane, personal character into the showroom.
Within, semi-circular seating and plants create pockets for smaller groups, allowing multiple exchanges to unfold simultaneously without interruption. Activated by an integrated café, the aangan becomes an anchor of pause within the larger showroom, shifting the experience beyond transaction into a more social and reflective mode of exchange.
The Display: Vehicle as the Protagonist
Drawing from the earlier work for Mahindra’s design studio, the overarching architectural shell is envisioned as a neutral grey backdrop, allowing the vehicles to remain the protagonists of the space. Within a regular structural grid, the plan ensures efficient vehicular movement for eight cars, positioning them in a staggered arrangement that optimises display and allows unobstructed movement around each vehicle.
A restrained palette of grey runs through this space, reinterpreted through softly polished terrazzo that retains the memory of cement while introducing a greater sense of finesse. An exposed ceiling heightens the perception of volume, creating an unobstructed environment for both user movement and vehicle display.
Lighting is calibrated to reveal the nuanced details of the vehicles. Large, suspended boxes wash the space evenly, accentuating the form and surface of the cars. Within the grey, brass inlays, the subtle grooves introduce layers of human craft and refinement, an ode to the detailing of the vehicles themselves, while fluted terrazzo panels at the entrance frame the reception and reinforce a tactile richness.
Beyond the Aangan: An Evolving Urban Marketplace
Beyond the aangan, a constellation of functions coexists in the showroom, recalling the idea of an urban marketplace that supports both social engagement and business operations.
All spaces are designed to adapt to multiple uses throughout the day. A large table anchoring the offices, movable partitions, and open seating allow areas to shift between individual discussions, team use, and larger gatherings, without altering the overall spatial continuity.
The continuity with the showroom’s design language is reinforced here through the extension of the material palette. The warmth of the aangan, expressed through plywood extending to walls and crafted finishes, carries into the operational areas, softening the distinction between front-of-house and back-of-house, and allowing the showroom to read as a single, cohesive environment.
In designing the showroom for Mahindra & Mahindra, SJK Architects has created a marriage of two distinct aspirations of the Indian clientele today: a desire for more refined, futuristic global expressions and an enduring way of living that values shared experiences and social exchange. In bringing these together, the space reflects the brand evolution, one that embraces growth and a more contemporary language, while remaining rooted in the shared, deeply social ways in which such milestones continue to unfold.
