Rooshad Shroff on how his furniture came to be a celebration of crafts

‘Top Notch’ is a fortnightly column where journalist and editor Namrata Zakaria introduces us to fashion’s elite and erudite club. *** It’s hard to believe that architect, furniture and product designer Rooshad Shroff has only been in the business since a decade. He graduated from Harvard university’s Graduate School of Design in 2011, but in just ten years he has catapulted himself on top of the pile of India’s leading designers. Shroff’s journey has been closely linked with fashion. He had interned with Issey Miyake, and has worked on the Christian Louboutin and Hermes stores in Mumbai. His furniture line is pioneering in marrying embroidery techniques with wood, blurring the line between the two disciplines. Shroff’s unique take on Indian craft in modern design has made his work a signature, be it a space, an item of furniture or a product. “I like being part of the wholistic way of design,” he tells me from his swanky new atelier, overlooking Mumbai’s sumptuous Horniman Circle Garden. The building is the same as Louboutin’s Mumbai boutique sits, that Shroff assisted to design. Right next door is Hermes, where Shroff is responsible for recreating mechanical toy-store-inspired windows season after season. “I have to remind people I am still an architect, not just the furniture guy or the Hermes windows guy,” he laughs. “I love design at different scales, urban planning, landscapes, micro scales like furniture or graphics. I’ve been fortunate to get involved with branding and packaging of some of the projects I’ve worked with. Even when I was at architecture school at Harvard, or before that at Cornell, product design always excited me. My extra-curricular activities included fashion too. In my two years with Zaha Hadid, I imbibed the way they worked on products.” Shroff is especially renowned for his use of craft techniques in everything he does. In furniture his use of embroidery with woodwork is extraordinary in its scope and style. His embroidered screens, benches, mirrors, C-shaped chairs (the recent one is a collaboration with artist Tanya Goel) are celebrated across art and design magazines. “I had made an embroidered screen as part of my joinery course at university. But when I had returned to India, Maximiliano Modesti (the Paris-Mumbai based fashion and crafts entrepreneur) opened his factory to me. This allowed me to use threads on wood. I had always shied away from craft, thinking it was too ornamental, decorative, whereas my eyes were trained for modernity. Also, the quality of craft in India was rather poor, which made us not appreciate it as much. But I lacked the knowledge on the possibilities and potentials of craft. Once I began, one craft led to another, and my furniture became a celebration of it. I remember Cecilia Morelli Parikh of Le Mill chanced upon a piece and asked me to do a collection for her. More projects organically kept popping up,” he says.

Shroff says he found furniture easy to make. All he needed was two carpenters in his parents’ garage, and he began working with his signature embroidered wood. “Furniture was never really a big business; it was a passion project. But these embroidered pieces came to be a springing point, it became the purest form of research at my office. We would create the product and develop an interiors story around it,” he avers. Is it hard to convince customers that embroidery techniques can work on furniture and can last? Shroff says the pieces became more press-friendly than user-friendly. “People would always ask ‘how do we clean it and how do we use it?’ When I started, I didn’t know how it would weather, but now we can see it does wonderfully. Even the cladding at the Louboutin store after all these years looks as good as new,” he explains. “Plus, the embroidered items are rather expensive. I don’t bargain with my karigars (artisans), I pay them way over the market rate. But I have recurring buyers, so I guess that validates it,” he smiles. Shroff has made cabinets with French knots for Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja’s London home. He’s also done the store design for a menswear brand in the UAE. His is a great commitment to craft and hand-making techniques — be it in his wood or marble products or even his chessboard. “It’s rare when you can identify where things are made. Machine-made products don’t allow for that sort of authorship. The layer that craft brings to our lives is at our disposal so easily. It’s a luxury for the rest of the world: for example, sculpting in marble is so alien to the west as it is absurdly expensive. But what you can do with hands you cannot do with machines,” he explains.

Shroff kept himself assiduous during the lockdown last year and this year too. He launched a beautiful website chronicling all his work, and he also opened his first atelier. “The lockdowns allowed us a pause and made me look at where I can take my practice. My team and I worked from home every single day. The website was needed to showcase all our work. And with the dip in real estate prices, I could easily grab the atelier space,” he says. Two years ago, Shroff put together a remarkable project to raise money for a girls’ school in Jaisalmer. The Rajkumari Ratnavati school, funded by Michael Daube’s Citta Foundation, is designed by the New York-based architect Diana Kellogg and has uniforms designed by Sabyasachi. “Michael and I are friends and he had mentioned to me he ran out of funding,” Shroff says. He decided to help him by inviting 12 celebrated names from art, fashion and design (some of them were Louboutin, Sabyasachi, BV Doshi, Bijoy Jain, Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla, Anamika Khanna, T Venkanna and Atul Dodiya) to design a print for a marble inlay plate, which Shroff and his team of artisans would create as an artwork. Sonam Kapoor and Isha Ambani joined in as collaborators too. He is soon designing the Ambani daughter’s office as well. Shroff, despite his young years, belongs to the hallowed club of legendary Indian artists who have pushed the boundaries between design and function, art and craft, and traditional and contemporary.