personal project
Duration: on going
Duration: on going
A summer of making in a room I barely know
6 days before my flight back to India
My printer is packed. The lamp is done. I have no idea if it works. I won’t know until I hang it up in a room I’ve never really seen.
20 June '25 A Beginning Before I Land
This project wasn’t planned. Not really.
I knew I had the summer. I knew I was going back to India. And I knew my room there a half-finished rooftop mess needed furniture. But I didn’t know what I would make. I didn’t even know what the space actually looked like now.
So this is the start.
This isn’t even my childhood room. It’s a roof extension that was once just storage. The layout is strange. The space was extended, walls removed. A staircase now cuts through the center of the room. The older section doesn’t have a single window. The new section if you can call it that is basically bricks, some glass doors, and a lot of bad decisions. Floor-to-ceiling windows made from reused door panels. No frames. No right angles. Nothing flat.
It’s not a room. It’s a design constraint.
And that’s exactly why I’m starting here. This summer, I’ll design a series of furniture and lighting pieces just for this space one by one. This is not a collection about sustainability or storytelling. It’s not about clients or systems. It’s just about me, the tools I have, the room I’ve been given, and the pieces I want to live with.
This is the first one: Just Another Lamp.
21 June '25 The Room Itself
The floor in the old room is terrazzo. Green marble chunks. Grey filler. It needs polishing.
The new part has raw concrete floors they’ll also need polishing.
Nothing in the room is finished properly. And none of the surfaces are flat. So I’ve decided I can’t trust the shell. I’ll limewash everything. If I can’t fix the walls, I’ll hide them. The whole room is like a jigsaw made of bad angles and uneven cuts.
It’s a mess. But I think it’ll be mine.
22 June '25 Why the Quotes Matter
You might be wondering why I keep quoting books in this.
I just started reading The Beauty of Everyday Things picked it up from Tate Modern after seeing the Do Ho Suh: Walk the House exhibition.
That exhibition reminded me how space and memory are connected. And the book is doing the same thing for design.
This isn’t about referencing to sound clever this is about starting a dialogue. With the reader. With myself. With the room.
22 June '25 A Principle for Finishes
"From the fact that things are made to be used, they come to have a beauty of their own." -Soetsu Yanagi
This is the principle I’m following for finishes.
No fake patina. No perfect paint.
Just surfaces that want to be touched, used, and maybe ignored.
23 June '25 Lighting Logic
I’ve started sketching out how the lighting will work.
I want to use those LED tube lights I pulled from my old room harsh, cool, white. But they look horrible now. Cracked plastic. Yellowed ends. So I’m thinking: wrap them in rusted U-shaped metal tubing. Wax-coated to seal the decay. Let it age.
Use cooler lights around the edge of the room task lighting.
Then make warmer versions for the central space ambient.
I’ll add pivoting mechanisms to aim them. Probably welded.
My 3D printers are half-dead now after the T-Rex model. And I don’t want to rely on them too much.
I have access to a welder. That’s going to be more useful.
23 June '25 Floating & Anchored
The shelves will float. They won’t touch the floor.
I want the work table to be grounded though. Heavy.
I’m thinking a concrete base for stability, and multi-level surfaces above.
I can’t work on one thing at a time so the table has to adapt.
And I want to be able to hide the mess.
That’s non-negotiable.
26 June '25 Flight Thoughts
This is me trying to design something that will adapt with me, not something I have to adapt to.
The lamp needs to be adjustable each one hung at a different height. Because the ceilings are low. Because I don’t like static things. And because this is about me figuring out my own style.
I keep going back to that Yohji Yamamoto quote: "Start by copying. Copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself."
I’ve copied for years. This is me trying to find myself. I would normally call it stealing.
26 June '25 What I Know I Need to Make
Here’s the rough list:
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The hanging lamp: already exists. Mood lighting. Statement piece. Not functional lighting.
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Tube/work lights: actual lighting. Cool for work, warm for rest. Split wiring.
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The bed: has to be low. Needs storage below (a long drawer for linen). Needs a wide enough edge to act like a desk. Control center. Side tables. Light switches.
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Clothing cupboard: shaped around a stair void. Ventilation window in the middle. Lighting integrated.
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Shelving: needs to span between the two rooms. Also needs to store all the appearance models I’ve made.
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Work table: must move out of the way. Needs levels. Must handle multiple projects. Needs to hide mess. Adjustable height.
This will change.
But it’s the start.
27 June '25 — Back in India
Landed. Hair cut. Road trip starts tomorrow.
27 June '25 Concrete Bed Spiral
This hotel bed is concrete. I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole.
It looks simple just form and pour but the moment I want drawers, cantilevers, or the ability to stand on it, the engineering gets serious.
Glass fiber rebar. Extra bracing. It becomes a problem.
Maybe I just cast a side table.
Or the headboard.
Or make a wooden frame with a concrete base.
Concrete is great in compression, terrible in leverage. And I want things to float.
29 June '25 On the Road
Second stop on the trip.
This hotel it’s got something.
The finishes feel raw. Honest. Not polished. Not trying too hard.
The lighting is what sticks. Spotlights. Wood-covered fixtures. Light going both ways up and down. Mood above, function below.
It’s asymmetrical. I like that. The room breathes.
I want to steal this idea make a version of it.
Maybe the mood light points up. The work light down.
16 July '25 The Room is a Mess
Back at my grandmother’s. It’s been a few weeks.
Before I left, I remeasured everything. And then it hit me: this room is a disaster.
My head hurt. Not metaphorically. Actually hurt.
The warped walls. The unusable corners. The fact that nothing in the room is reliable. It started to spiral.
Everyone I spoke to made it worse. More problems. More opinions.
This room feels like it was built by a blind monkey with its hands tied behind its back.
So: I can’t fix it. But I can hide it.
That’s now a design constraint.
I can’t trust anyone’s workmanship. So I’ll do it myself.
And the one material I trust? Aluminium extrusions.
My 3D printers are made of them. They’re light. Easy to modify. Modular. Strong enough. They’re becoming part of the design language.
The cupboard is first.
It has to fit a weird vertical space only 18 cm deep, nearly 275 cm tall. One side overlooks the staircase.
And for the bed, I’ll either modify my parents’ old frame or build it in aluminium too.
16 July '25 Let Nature Take Over
Those floor-to-ceiling windows? They’re scratched beyond saving.
Can’t be cleaned from outside. So I’m going to cover them.
With plants.
Big concrete planters. Let nature take over. Green out the chaos.
It feels like cheating. But then I remember my old room.
The walls were trash. I covered them in pigmented white cement. Drew on top in charcoal. Filled the place with plants. Hundreds.
Since moving to London, I haven’t had that.
Now I do. I’ve got two months. Let’s see what happens.
16 July '25 A Tangent on Craft
This isn’t just frustration. It’s observation.
I haven’t seen anything new anything made now with care. Not here.
The plaster’s uneven. The joints are lazy. Finishes are rushed. Every corner is pretending.
People still say they can do things. “Bas ho jayega.” But when the work shows up? It doesn’t match.
It’s not that craft in India is dead. It’s just buried under quick fixes and over-promises. Mass manufacturing replaced mentorship. Shortcuts replaced skills.
I’m not trained either. But I care.
I’ll study. I’ll test. That’s why I keep doing it myself.
16 July '25 A Rock and a View
Right now, I’m sitting at my grandmother’s. Calm view out the window. Finally quiet.
On the road trip, I picked up some rocks. One in particular a piece of orange sandstone.
I’m planning to slice the end off and put a light inside. Let it glow. But then: how do you hang a 15kg rock from a ceiling without it falling and crushing you?
No idea yet. But I’ll figure it out.
Still designing. Still building.
Just not spiraling.