Some returns take you back to a place.
Others bring you back to something in yourself.
For AMPM, this one did both
Our Mumbai Wāpasī
After seven years, we're back in Bombay, with a new home in Kala Ghoda. But this didn't begin with a store. It began earlier, with a lot of looking inward and a few difficult questions. What actually mattered to us? What still felt true, after all this time? And after almost twenty-four years of making, changing and figuring things out, what did we actually want to carry forward?
"The point was never to start over.
It was to really look at what already
existed and be honest about
what still rang true."
-PRIYANKA MODI, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
For Priyanka Modi, AMPM's Creative Director, this wasn't just a brand exercise. It came out of her own journey through Sadhana and Gyan Marg, a practice of self-inquiry that slowly changed how she saw a lot of things, including the brand she'd built. The point was never to start over. It was to really look at what already existed and be honest about what still rang true.
That's what brought us back to our core. Thoughtful design, real experience, and intention. Clothes and spaces made to bring some ease into everyday life. And making things with a little more purpose behind them.
This store is the first physical expression of that return to our core,
the first time it's taken the shape of an actual space.
A CITY THAT STAYS WITH YOU
There's something about Bombay that lets you show up exactly as you are, and somehow makes space for you anyway.
Talk to anyone who's lived here long enough, and that love comes through almost immediately, in how they describe their street, the corner they always stop at, the face they see daily but never learnt the name of.
Maybe that's why so many artists have put this city into their work. Pablo Bartholomew found his frame in its streets. Saadat Hassan Manto wrote its contradictions without flinching. Basu Chatterjee found poetry in its quieter moments. Different mediums, different decades, but the city shows up in all of it.
You can move away, build a life elsewhere. But you come back, and something about it feels instantly familiar - a reminder that it had already become home, long before you'd admitted it to yourself.
That feeling is where our Wāpasi comes from.
If we were coming back to Bombay, Kala Ghoda made the most sense. This is a neighbourhood that's always been good at holding different worlds together at once. Galleries next to cafés. Fashion and design tucked in among old buildings and familiar landmarks.
There's the Jehangir Art Gallery, NGMA, the buzz of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, but also the smaller stuff: a coffee after seeing an exhibition, walking into a store on a whim, noticing a façade you must have passed a hundred times before.
You don't usually come to Kala Ghoda for just one thing. It tends to pull you somewhere you didn't plan on going. That sense of discovery ended up shaping a lot of how we thought about the store.
We didn't want to build a space that felt like a retail touchpoint. So we started somewhere else. With a home. Priyanka's own, actually. Minimal, warm, inviting - that became our reference point for a space that feels considered without trying too hard.
One material runs through the walls, the ceilings, up the sculptural staircase at the centre, so the whole place feels continuous rather than assembled.
A Store That Feels Like Home
We didn't want to build a space that felt like a retail touchpoint. So we started somewhere else. With a home. Priyanka's own, actually. Minimal, warm, inviting - that became our reference point for a space that feels considered without trying too hard.
One material runs through the walls, the ceilings, up the sculptural staircase at the centre, so the whole place feels continuous rather than assembled.
"In a city that is
always moving, we
wanted to create a
space to slow down."
- PRIYANKA MODI, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Wood comes in here and there, adding warmth, shaping the shelves, the bench, the little corners where you can sit down and stay a while. We chose to show less rather than more, so each piece has the space to actually be looked at and appreciated for the craft that went into it. The idea, really, was simple. Build somewhere you don't feel rushed. Somewhere you can walk in, look around, grab a coffee, find something you weren't expecting, or just sit for a bit.
In a city that never really slows down, we wanted to build a place that does. Something calm and easy, in a city that's always felt like ours.
A Wāpasi, in every sense.
It's a return to Bombay after seven years. But mostly, it's a return we get to share. Our doors are open in Kala Ghoda. Come by, at a pace that feels right by you.
