Somewhere in the last decade, good taste became a synonym for restraint. Oatmeal sofas, greige walls, tasteful wood. Safe, sensible and almost impossible to get wrong. Arunika Sarkar thinks that is exactly the problem.

“People are scared to use colour,” says Sarkar, co-founder of Kolkata-based Atelier Arunika. It is a small sentence with a large idea inside it, that the muted homes we admire may be built less on taste than on anxiety.

Philosophers have a name for the instinct to sand down anything that might draw attention. Call it the comfort of the unremarkable. If nothing in the room can be criticised, nothing in it can be loved either. Sarkar’s answer is to go the other way. She draws from the Memphis school of design, the loud, joyful rebellion led by Ettore Sottsass in the 1980s, and from the 1970s and 80s palette she thinks the world should revisit.

Her partner Arindam Chatterjee and she launched the brand only this year, with a symmetrical, pastel-hued run of cabinets and credenzas. Their ‘Ramino’ debut at Milan in April, including a powder pink and green Canasta bar cabinet, looked like a Wes Anderson set.

Now, at India Design ID Mumbai, held in the city’s BKC area, they present ‘Forma Pois Memoirs’, a five-piece polka-dot collection that invites comparison with the late Yayoi Kusama.

Also Read: Malavika Mohanan’s house is proof that a home can carry its roots

The comparison is more useful than it first appears. Kusama turned dots into a way of seeing the world, a repeating pattern that dissolves the self into something larger. Atelier Arunika uses the dot differently. Theirs is a way of remembering. Each piece reaches back into childhood, the one period of life before most of us learn to be afraid of colour.

The Cromatica totem is a stack inspired by pittu, the childhood game of knocking down a pile of stones. Euphorica, a wall piece, borrows from Bengali hand fans, the kind that moved the air through summer afternoons. Teatrica, a powder-blue and pink cabinet, takes the shape of a small child’s frock. And Dolce Chaos, a chocolate-coloured console peppered with powder-blue dots, is modelled on a bioscope, the peep-show box that once turned a street corner into a theatre.

None of these objects is a replica. They are memories reduced to their most essential shapes and then given back to adults as storage. There is something quietly radical in that. Furniture is usually asked to be useful and to disappear. Here it is asked to remind you of who you were before you learned to disappear yourself.

Also Read: Kalaa, Vizag, the saree store that thinks it's a grandmother's house

The idea underneath it all is old. The ancient Greeks distinguished between living and living well, and for many thinkers the difference was joy, the willingness to take delight seriously. A room that never risks a colour has chosen the first. A room with a dotted bioscope console in it is at least attempting the second.

That may be why the collection has outlasted a single fair. After Mumbai, ‘Forma Pois Memoirs’ travels to Dutch Design Week from October 17 to 25, then to Copenhagen Design Week and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York next year.

Three of the world’s most design-literate audiences will be asked the same question Sarkar is asking visitors in BKC.

Are you really choosing beige because you love it, or because it cannot judge you back?

A polka dot does not apologise. It sits there, round, cheerful and slightly absurd, and dares the room to be braver. Perhaps the most practical piece of advice in design this year is also the simplest, remember what you loved before you learned to be careful, and put a little of it where you sit.

(All images belong to Atelier Arunika and are used here for representational purposes only.)