Rain is an eatery that doesn’t want to look like one. Designer Rajiv Saini has thus dotted the interiors with tasteful props and warm lighting to create a calm, colourful, and homely ambience.
This establishment is tucked away in a quiet corner in the leafy by-lanes of Juhu in Mumbai. Three pink African daisies encased in glass windows greet you at the gate, just as soon as you pass the wall with steel blobs that have the name of the restaurant, Rain, discreetly engraved on it.
The outside gate opens into a courtyard-like space, complete with a pond in the middle, a bar at one end and a seating of 22 covers. The outdoor dining courtyard adopts a contemporary approach. Corrugated metal panels and exposed concrete surfaces lend an industrial edge to an otherwise calm repertoire of marble glow-lamps, candle-lighting and water bodies.
Stepping indoors, one enters a huge room. Pillars adorned with smooth white pebbles cleverly divide the room into the cigar lounge, another bar and the main restaurant with seating of 38 covers. The dark wenge wood panelled bar inside is the visual highlight, with its inset circular concave mirrors, enlivened by the saffron-to-fuchsia–to-aubergine coloured wall of woven reeds, which adds in some eastern exotica. Bamboo plants kept in the corners compliment the rainforest-like look.
Besides the pillars and the base of the lamps, the pebbles reappear on the table-tops in the bar area as well as on the shelf of the bar, stuck to it vertically. Bamboo sticks covered with raw silk fabric in colours ranging from deep maroon, to pink, black and orange form the backdrop to the restaurant. The curtains made of khus and chattai, or ‘chics’ as they are known, add an oriental touch to Rain.
The lighting throughout the restaurant is hidden artfully. The light from the under-lit table bounces off the chandelier and falls subtly on the wall behind. Direct light comes from the short, thick candles on the table or the cylindrical steel lamps that are placed on the floor at the side of each table. Huge windows with walnut brown panes ensure that you enjoy a view of the candlelit outside space, including the pond, even if you are sitting inside.
The design of the entire place is hinged on, well, ‘rain’, a highly evocative word that brings to mind vivid images of the tropics. “The idea was to make an ‘ethno - modernist’ statement with the interiors, bringing together rich dark woods like wenge from the Congo region and contrasting them with the textures of exposed honed concrete and grit columns. A space aimed at creating a mood that lifts your spirits, while the food liberates your senses,” says its architect Rajiv Saini, who also holds the distinction of restoring the Devigarh Palace in Jaipur.
