The new Indian luxury product is exclusively finished and customized to maximize your comfort, say the country’s young designers

Easy comforts

The new Indian luxury product is exclusively finished and customized to maximize your comfort, say the country’s young designers

 

There’s a delicious green Italian leather oak-frame chair I’m coveting these days, with little wooden armrests and space enough to turn and face the friend you’re sitting with. It costsRs 50,000 even without the leather—Rs. 1 lakh, leather included—and is designed by the design firm Urbanist. The difference between this and traditional luxe popular in India till now? Material, functionality, form.
A certain kind of Indian customer is moving away from ostentatious luxury to high design, gilded thalis be damned. No patience for lazy kitsch or the boring albeit lovely richness of traditional Mughal or Rajasthani design; the luxury is in the detail of how the object feels, functions, charms.
How are today’s young Indian designers handling the new appetite for luxury?

Good finish: Urbanist’s Brian DeMuro (left) and Puru Das. Courtesy Urbanist

“India is getting a different luxury sector altogether,” says Amresh Panigrahi, coordinator of the lifestyle accessory design department at the National Institute of Design (NID), Gandhinagar, Gujarat. “People want products that reflect on what either traditional or modern Indian means, and they don’t want to get it from outside.” His department began in 2002, outside of the traditional NID preserve of work with bamboo and tribals, and trains those who want to go high-end as well as mass-market. Like the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay’s master of design programme and Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology’s design programmes, it is dealing with increased variety. “Of our 105 graduates thus far, 10% have set up their own studios and work in the luxury sector,” says Panigrahi. “Ten per cent work in social innovation, and the remaining work with space accessories. It’s a tough market, but luxury product designers do prevail.”

Traditional: Designers Kuldeep T. (left) and Salam Hidish Singh co-founded bent by design five years ago, along with Yusuf Mannan.

One young indie firm is Bangalore-based bent by design, founded five years ago by NID alumni and furniture designers Kuldeep T. and Yusuf Mannan as well as Srishti School graduate and furniture designer Salam Hidish Singh—all in their 30s. Their curvy, almost mouldable looking Swadeshi line stretches varieties of wood this way and that to create benches, kitchen stools, couches and seats. All of these handcrafted, signature pieces cradle you; there’s something traditionally Indian about the postures you can assume on these comfortable objects, the classic cross-legged ruminatory pose being one of them. A Swadeshi living-room set, including two upholstered single-seater sofas, one two-seater and one three-seater, costs Rs. 2.5 lakh, which is not terribly expensive in the handcrafted high-end furniture market, but is certainly above the average.A team of craftsmen and contractors handles larger projects and the central three craft more personal projects in their workshop, situated by a mango orchard outside central Bangalore. “The only way to achieve high design is to make it lovingly with my own hands,” says Kuldeep, whose rocking crib with attached seating space for the mother (Rs. 50,000) is particularly unusual.

Gentle luxe: Urbanist’s oak-frame chair, Rs. 45,000 (without leather), complemented by a lamp imported from Portugal, Rs. 1.57 lakh. Courtesy Urbanist

Bent by design has recently been commissioned by a client to create a high-end table—5x6ft, and made of high-quality teak wood planks—for Rs. 5 lakh. “To me, luxury means owning a one-off piece of furniture,” adds Kuldeep.For Brian DeMuro and Puru Das, whose design firm Urbanist is much sought after in the National Capital Region for personalized furniture and interior spaces, the perception of what is beautiful is just expanding in today’s urban India. “Taste is not calcified here,” says Das, displaying the parchment they imported from Turkey and played with to finish a subtly mottled shelving unit in their Jor Bagh home—the final visual effect is like that of an understated painting. “People are confident about what their taste is, and will spend on good finish.”
All their materials are of a high quality or particular finish: gentle luxe. An oak-frame chair is complemented by a lamp imported from Portugal; a shelving unit is made of palisander shelves and matte black supports—the screen in the shelving unit is made of hand-carved teak. These considered, even fussy pieces are part of the two lines Urbanist plans yearly.
Das, 37, and DeMuro, 46, left New York City for New Delhi a decade ago to found Basix, their earlier, more plebeian avatar. They ran their business for six years. Basix was rebranded as Urbanist four years ago. They began to customize more high-end furniture one-and-a-half years ago, and were soon doing entire spaces.
“Design for me is an organic sensory experience,” says Mukul Sood, 36, an ex-lawyer who formed a design firm called Parapluie in New Delhi two years ago, without any formal training. “Parapluie works to bring harmony between life and design,” he says. The firm has designed spas, houses, book fair spaces and home accessories which Sood customizes for clients. “I have an idea for a mirror frame, fully upholstered— even in the back.”

Stretching the envelope: Bent by design’s rocking crib without seat, under Rs. 50,000.

His wooden hanging lamps, carved flower-patterned mirror frames, bamboo poster beds and fabric-upholstered cupboards have a rustic aesthetic, with slightly rough finishes and generous padding which are more country house than Delhi power home. But young professionals looking to spend on their own homes are ready to splurge on a space. So it looks like Sood’s Green Park barsati home, full of cherished one-off items. A teak table at Rs. 30,000 is hardly high end, but as the young designer begins his first full line, he says he will price higher if he sells in a store.Luxury is something desirable, not a necessity. But luxury is, of course, also that which is expensive or hard to obtain, something sumptuous the neighbours will envy, as the ubiquitous Onida TV jingle went in the 1980s. It is within these multiple definitions that the Indian concept of luxury exists. While Indian designers want to take more products out to a sector with increased spending power, they don’t want everyone to have them. “Luxury is not democratic,” says DeMuro. “How would it be luxury then?”
It is in a redefinition of luxury that young Indian designers find their vision—and their market. “A luxury product doesn’t have to be something which hasn’t been done before; it’s about how it makes me feel now,” says Sood. “The ability to choose what I want.”