Art Deco is an architectural language that has never entirely gone out of fashion in India. Its geometry, its glamour, its democratic accessibility — the way it makes luxury available to a broad public through pattern and proportion rather than through expensive materials alone — makes it a natural fit for the cinema typology. India’s great single-screen cinemas of the 1930s and 1940s — the Regal in Mumbai, the Eros in Churchgate, the Metro in Calcutta — were built in the Art Deco idiom. The multiplex era largely abandoned this heritage in favour of the generic international mall aesthetic. Bricolage Bombay’s design for Inox PVR at Prism Mall, Hyderabad, brings it back.

The Prism cinema lobby is organised around the characteristic geometry and symmetry of Art Deco: bilateral symmetry, strong axial sightlines, the layering of decorative planes at ceiling level, and a bold colour palette anchored in teal and metallic gold. The flooring is executed in cut vitrified tiles laid in a dynamic geometric pattern that mirrors, with deliberate exactness, the ceiling’s own geometric composition. This pairing of floor and ceiling is one of the design’s most distinctive achievements: the visitor is caught between two patterned planes, surrounded by design in a way that is simultaneously theatrical and disciplined.

The ceiling is the lobby’s showpiece — a layered Art Deco composition that combines the geometric rigour of the style’s golden age with contemporary lighting techniques. Bricolage Bombay embedded warm LED strips within the ceiling’s recessed planes, creating a luminous architecture that reads as depth even though the ceiling is, in structural terms, flat. This lighting strategy turns the ceiling into an event — something that changes as the visitor’s position in the lobby shifts, producing a kinetic quality that the static geometry of Art Deco rarely achieves.

The teal colour palette — deployed across walls, panelling, and selected fitouts — is precise in its application. Teal is a colour with significant historical resonance in cinema design: it was widely used in the Streamline Moderne variant of Art Deco favoured by Hollywood studios in the 1930s, and it carries the association of glamour and escapism that is fundamental to the cinema’s cultural contract with its audience. At Prism, teal is offset against brass accents and creamy marble-effect panels, producing a combination that is rich but not overwrought.

The fitouts — signage, wayfinding, lighting fixtures, ticket counters, wall panelling, and seating — were all coordinated by Bricolage Bombay to ensure coherence across the full cinema experience. These elements, which are often treated as afterthoughts in the Indian cinema market, are here integrated into the design from the outset: the signage typeface was chosen to complement the geometric patterns of the wall panelling; the lighting fixtures were designed to echo the ceiling’s layered composition; the ticket counter was detailed as a piece of furniture as carefully crafted as the lobby walls that surround it.