Our Story
Since 1989
An optometry practice that happens to sell beautiful frames
Optique opened in Basant Lok, Vasant Vihar in 1989 — and has stayed there ever since. Three and a half decades in one market, fitting spectacles for families we now see across three generations.
The bench came first
Most eyewear shops begin with a shopfront and add an optometrist. Optique began the other way round. Ajeet Bhardwaj had been at the lens bench for years before opening the door in 1989, and the practice was built on a single conviction: get the eyes right and the eyewear follows. Forty-five years on, he is still the person the difficult prescriptions come to.
That order of priority is the reason we still refuse to sell a lens we haven't measured for. It is slower. It is also why people come back.
What clinical actually means
A refraction is not a vending machine. Two people with the same numbers on paper need different lenses — different corridor lengths, different coatings, different centring — because they use their eyes differently. Dispensing is the part most shops skip. It is the part we are known for.
The Vintage Wall
Somewhere along the way we stopped letting go of things. Frames from the nineties and early two-thousands — pieces that were extraordinary when they arrived and became irreplaceable once the moulds were gone — went onto a wall instead of into a drawer.
Most of them carry our own bespoke tints, mixed in-house: amber gradients, smoke-to-rose fades, tea greens. Original pieces, original hardware, tinted by us. It is the part of the boutique people photograph, and the reason a certain kind of collector comes to Basant Lok specifically.
The house today
Three optometrists, one examination room, and a catalogue that runs from Ray-Ban and Adidas through to Cartier and Chanel. We carry the international houses because our clients want them — but the conversation still starts with your eyes, not the logo on the temple.
For the maisons, that conversation happens by appointment. Those pieces are held at the boutique and fitted in person, because a ₹60,000 frame chosen from a photograph is a frame chosen badly.
Visit
Basant Lok Market, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi
Open daily, 11:00 – 21:00 · +91 98990 16027