Founded in 2015 by renowned pianist Arjun Sagar Gupta, The Piano Man has become one of India’s leading music venues for live performance and jazz, with locations in Gurugram and New Delhi’s posh Safdarjung Enclave. For its third and largest location in the capital’s Malviya Nagar neighborhood, Gupta aimed to evolve the brand and partnered with his longtime creative collaborator Amith Chhabra, founder of Studio LCD. While the previous interiors took inspiration from New Orleans’s historic Preservation Hall, this time Chhabra and Gupta looked back a few centuries, drawing on the spatial drama of Europe’s medieval Gothic cathedrals.
“We wanted to bring that same sense of awe into a modern music venue and have the architecture participate in the performance itself,” explains Chhabra. “Cathedrals were among the earliest immersive spaces, understanding scale, anticipation, acoustics, and emotion long before those words became part of the contemporary design vocabulary.”
Gothic Architecture Meets Modern Jazz
To increase guest capacity, Studio LCD built upward within the 8,500-square-foot space to create a structurally complex and carefully engineered seating arrangement. Akin to an opera house, the demi-lune venue features stage-side seating and two curving upper tiers: a second-floor level and a mezzanine suspended below. The layout preserves the sightlines, openness, acoustic quality and participation of each guest during the performance.
The alluring atmosphere of The Piano Man Malviya Nagar is brought to life through a layered material palette, period pieces and careful proportions. Modern, Gothic and ecclesiastical references form a cohesive language that avoids pastiche, including carved natural oak furniture and wall paneling, wrought-iron balustrades and staircase railings, metallic iconography and church pew seating systems that trace the venue’s curving interiors.
A signature bar greets patrons at the first-floor entrance, while its counterpart occupies the second floor. Both extend the Gothic vocabulary, with carved trefoil pointed arches framing custom stained-glass light boxes that cast a warm glow across each space. The sculptural centerpiece of the venue is the Studio LCD-designed chandelier that hangs above the stage from a vaulted ceiling. Composed of 564 individual trumpets, each fitted with a bulb, the fixture responds to the venue’s soaring volumes.
“We weren’t interested in creating a themed environment,” says Chhabra. “Our goal was to balance reverence with contemporary expression, distilling the emotional qualities of Gothic architecture into an interactive venue where music performance becomes an experience.”
Walk Through The Piano Man Malviya Nagar
Project Team: Amith Chhabra, Mohan Jyoti Nath and Kaushik Dikshit of Studio LCD. AV Integration AM Integrated: Aashish Mahindru. Civil Contractor: SRBS Interior. Structural Engineer: BMSF Design Consultants (P) Ltd. MEP Consultants & Execution: PS Air Solutions Pvt. Ltd. + SRBS Interior. Acoustic Consultant: Anutone Acoustics Limited. Stained Glass: Khaas Glass. Bar Consultant: Speed X. Kitchen Consultant: Wang Hospitality Equipment Private Limited.
Source: https://interiordesign.net
