‘If You've Got A Display, Be Sure To Make It Instagrammable'

Spiro Spero is an Architecture & Interior Design Firm in Mumbai whose stated mission is to make things that make people smile. In a special chat with VMRD, Keith Menon, Co-Founder, Spiro Spero, shares his take on what makes Spiro Spero different from its peers, and how a change of approach has helped them deal better with market challenges, especially after the rise of e-commerce & new players. Excerpts

Can you share a brief overview of Spiro Spero? What drove its launch?

We create, conceptualize, and develop commercial spaces and brands. We design and build hotels, restaurants, offices and other commercial spaces. While we do some on a Build - Setup - Transfer basis, most of our projects are turnkey. We have an in-house team of architects, engineers, designers, project managers who do all the work within the company. We’ve been in the industry for almost 10 years now and have been known mostly for our hospitality projects.

Our story is pretty crazy actually. Both partners are Mass Media students who majored in advertising. A few years later, we were bootstrapped and started working on travel and social projects when we got a random chance to design a friend’s bar. The bar did really well and we got our next client - a big chain of bars across the country and from there there’s been no looking back! We’ve been lucky enough to also design & set up an insanely beautiful music festival in the deserts of Rajasthan and some cool offbeat projects around the country.

Tell us about Spiro Spero’s design philosophy and about your approach to retail design in particular.

Our design philosophy is to always push the boundaries in conventional commercial design - to make spaces that are as unique as functionally possible. To be able to customize each thing to fit into a brand philosophy. Our company motto is Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas – which when translated from Latin means – Durability, Utility, Beauty – they are the 3 principles of architecture and design written by Vitruvius. We believe that just good looks or just plain utility or just building to last doesn’t work unless all 3 are cohesively brought together. We strive to do that in all our projects.