A mop you can slip your feet into

If you never leave home without a hand sanitiser, spend half your days wiping smudge marks off glass surfaces and get holiday greeting cards from your neighbourhood laundry, you are going to love Prime. It's Disneyland for the Bree Van de Kamps of the world

When power cleaners Aggie MacKenzie and Kim Woodburn offered home cleaning tips on Oprah Winfrey's show a few years ago, to demonstrate how simple it was to keepu00a0 household appliances sparkling clean, they slipped a few slices of lemon into an uncovered bowl of water and heated this in a grimy microwave for three minutes. Presto! The sticky deposits inside the machine softened and wiped right off, leaving behind only a lingering scent of citrus freshness. Equally interesting was the ladies' clinical computation of how germ-infested homes were. In one case, Aggie pointed out, "There are 11 million E coli on your dining table -- more bacteria than on a piece of dog faeces."

Chenille microfibre slippers

That, of course, was an extreme case, but with visitors constantly breezing through your home, pets jumping on your sofas and kids dragging their muddy shoes over your rug, do you believe the dirt detectives would give your place a clean chit? If not, it may be a good idea to stop by this store. With a whole array of imported cleaning agents, microfibre cloths and brushes to get your homes, kitchens, carpets, bathrooms and even cars squeaky-clean, the new store at CR2 is a dream come true for the hygiene-conscious.

Ideal for use on fragile objects, ostrich feather dusters (Rs 1,575 and Rs 2,100, depending on size) available here work more effectively than synthetic feather dusters thanks to hook-like barbules that grab dust particles. And naturally coated with lanolin, a wool-wax that attracts dust particles, similarly-priced lamb wool dusters can be used effectively even without chemical cleaning agents.

Free-size slippers that double as mops (Rs 695), made as they are from an ultra-soft, super-absorbent Chenille microfibre, thermos jackets (Rs 100), metallic water-bottles you can lock (Rs 2,075), refillable detergent brushes that make dishwashing less arduous (Rs 155), melamine sponges that work like erasers to remove ink marks on walls (Rs 295) and spine-like multi-chord binders (Rs 399) to tidy up your work-station are some of the interesting buys here.

Nifty gadgets like erasable notepads (Rs 199), washable sticky-dashboard-panels to hold your mobile phone or pocket-change (Rs 299), foldable water-bottles ideal for campers (Rs 125) and sipper-bottles with their own filtering-systems (Rs 575 for a bottle that can filter about 150 gallons or roughly 568 litres of water) are other reasons to stop by.

Shoppers who dropped in however, seemed most fascinated by the wide range of stain removers, mops, window wipers and Pocket-Bac hand sanitisers available in delicious-sounding flavours like Warm Vanilla Sugar and Nectarine Mist (Rs 250). Brightly-coloured silicone moulds for ice, chocolates, cakes, muffins and pies were also generating some interest.

Interestingly, an Italian rose-shaped silicone cake mould will cost you Rs 1,495 here, whereas similar flower moulds made in the USA cost about Rs 825.

Prime is Shop No. 15, ground floor, CR2, Backbay Reclamation, Nariman Point.
Call: 9322227717. Open through the week, 11 am to 10 pm