Furniture designer tests the limits of traditional crafts in contemporary interiors
From carpet weaving to pottery and metalwork, New Delhi-based furniture designer Gunjan Gupta strives to dovetail Indian crafts with contemporary furniture design.
The adage that good bones in a building are the essence of its strength and endurance is ever so true as from floor to ceiling height, a large room, good-sized windows, these are elements that can be difficult and expensive to change and should not be compromised but what can be changed in terms of design and interiors with the use of traditional crafts is limitless.
Growing up in Mumbai, Gunjan Gupta worked alongside interior designer Varsha Desai in her early career as a designer. Later after moving to New Delhi she dabbled herself into the world of Indian crafts and ateliers. As her career took shape, Gupta realized that contemporary furniture design was lacking in India and that her home country was practically absent from the global design conversation.
This realization made her take the decision of pursuing a master’s at Central Saint Martins in London, which demystified many unknown facts about the state of craft in India and empowered her with a vision for the future.
Now her studio Wrap which she opened in 2006 has constantly been working on unexplored potential of bringing these skills into contemporary product design. With the aim of reviving India’s traditional crafts and positioning them at the heart of the contemporary home. The Delhi-based interior and product design studio put the crafts such as carpet weaving, pottery, and metalwork to furnish the humble dwellings and hence challenge the idea that traditional crafts are incompatible with modern interiors.
The first craft she ever worked on while doing my master’s was the ancient throne-decorating technique of silver wrapping, which can reveal a piece’s past prestige and current decay,’ says Gupta. ‘I considered this idea of wrapping furniture in the context of 21st-century design and named my studio after this philosophy.’
The designer has also set up her first furniture line, Collectible Design with the notion of democratizing traditional crafts through contemporary Indian souvenirs — small yet powerful objects that highlight the best of my amazing country and showcase its craftspeople. The collectible design didn’t really exist in this part of the world. She was fortunate enough to have been given several opportunities to exhibit my work internationally and soon galleries and curators became interested.
With a design approach that balances ‘concept, craft, and context’, Gupta works with craftspeople at her New Delhi studio — a close collaboration that allows her and her team to ensure quality control. Her design approach is also shaped by the various collaborations she’s done with international brands. One of her masterpieces, the Bicycle Throne — a chair made from various bicycle parts — illustrates her interest in the use of recycled materials, which arose from a 2008 collaboration with Dutch design collective Droog.
In interior designs, nothing is just added for the sake of it, a lot of attention has to be paid in a way that all the elements are seamlessly mitered into the floorboards to obtain the confluence between the various object which demand undoubtedly demands fine workmanship.
Images by Gunjan Gupta
