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.
This is the start of something I can’t name yet.
Not a project. Not a collection. Not a concept.
Just… a beginning.
“Copy, copy, copy… at the end, you’ll find yourself.”
— Yoji Yamamoto
I’ve spent the last two years copying — or as I’d normally say, stealing.
Stealing styles, tools, workflows, sketching habits.
That’s how I learned. That’s how I got through design school. And maybe this summer is the moment I start asking:
what would I design if I wasn’t stealing from anyone else?
I’m designing furniture for a room that used to be a storage dump. It was never meant to be lived in. Half of it is made of old glass doors turned into windows. There’s a staircase cutting right through the middle. No surface is flat. No corner is square.
Still — it’s mine for the summer.
A few days ago, I went to see Do Ho Suh’s Walk the House at Tate Modern.
The translucent silk rooms, the memory-architecture, the weird familiarity of reconstructed homes — it felt exactly like what I’m doing, just from the opposite end. Suh maps out places he once lived. I’m designing for a place I’ve never fully seen. His rooms preserve memory. Mine are chasing it.
On the way out, I found The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi in the shop. I bought it without thinking. It just felt like the right thing to carry into the summer.
“True beauty is not made; it is born naturally, arising from necessity.”
— Soetsu Yanagi
This isn’t about problem-solving. There’s no target user. No metrics. No big ideas.
I’m not trying to fix anything.
I’m trying to make something because I want to — not because I have to.
This room, and the objects I’ll fill it with, aren’t nostalgic. They’re not symbolic. They’re just real. Real problems. Real limitations. Real tools. This is me making for the sake of making — fast, weird, unpolished.
The first object is a lamp. A chandelier for a room with a low ceiling — truly dumb. But it felt right. That’s what matters.
Now that I think about it, this isn’t the first time I’ve made decisions for this space.
Back during my winter break — over New Year's — I stood in what was then still just a raw rooftop and decided how I wanted the wiring to run. That’s when I mapped it out:
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The new extension would be my studio — the place to make, build, photograph, try.
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The original low-ceiling room would be for sleeping — quiet, dark, closed off.
The floors in the new space are raw concrete. They’ll need to be polished. But the old room — the one I’ll sleep in — has something better: a terrazzo floor with green marble and grey fill. It’s uneven, needs polishing, but it has that quiet beauty I didn’t expect. That room will also be lime-washed, not for style, but to visually flatten the mess of the shell. I can’t trust the walls to behave. So I’ll hide them — softly, without drama.
That’s the theme, really.
I’m designing in reaction to chaos — using what I can, fixing only what needs fixing, and working around everything else.
And when it comes to finishes — I’ve made a decision.
I’m following Yanagi here:
“The fact that the colouring is vulgar, the shapes thin, weak, and prone to break, and that the finish easily flakes, all this comes from a lack of honest attention to the objects’ utilitarian purpose. I am tempted to call this type of work amoral and unethical.
Folk craft is thus devoted to healthy utilitarian purposes.”
— Soetsu Yanagi
That’s the principle now.
Finishes aren’t decoration. They’re function.
Everything I make this summer will be finished with that honesty in mind. If it chips, if it flakes, if it’s weak — I’ve failed.
But if it holds up, gets used, and blends into life — I’ve done it right.
I’ve also started planning out the rest of the lighting.
I want to reuse the old LED tube lights I pulled out of my last room — the cooler-toned ones that still work but look destroyed. Cracked, discoloured plastic. They’ll be mounted along the edges of the room to keep the centre clean. To hide how rough they look, I’m thinking of sliding them into U-shaped metal tubing, letting that rust a bit, and then coating it in a thin layer of wax. Let it age in place. Let it grow with the room. I’ll treat it less like a fixture and more like a living material.
Then there’s the warm lighting — the ones I actually want to live under. I’ll build those in the same linear tube format, but with a pivoting arm that lets them angle out. That will be trickier.
The printers I have at home are dying — barely survived the T-Rex build, and now they’re on their last legs. So this time, I’ll skip printing and go back to metal. I’ve got access to a welder, so I’m going to design simple pivot frames that can be built fast and fixed when they break. No plastic. No fake cleverness. Just frames, wires, and light.
The whole system will be split in two:
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Cool light for when I’m working.
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Warm light for when I’m living.
I’ve also been sketching out storage and structure — particularly the shelves and the worktable.
The shelving units will float. Nothing touches the ground. They’ll anchor into the wall and disappear when not in use — no visible weight, no clutter. But they still need to work. They’ll hold tools, materials, papers, sketches, parts.
That’s why the worktable will be the opposite: grounded, heavy, dead solid. I want to cast a concrete base for it — to stabilise the rest of the space. It becomes a visual and physical counterbalance. The shelves can move. The light can pivot. But the table is unshakable.
This approach — lightness held up by heaviness — comes straight out of The Beauty of Everyday Things. It’s not just about “balance” in the visual sense. It’s about designing things to behave honestly. To be used hard, over time, and still make sense. To let the practical logic of the object decide the form, not just the finish.
If Yanagi were writing about a shelving system, he’d probably say the same thing:
Let it be easy to use, reliable, and ready at hand — no more, no less.
I’m not sure what comes next — probably the bed, or the first thing I build when I land. Each piece will be designed for that room, for this time, and for me. Nothing else.
This page will hold the journey.
If you’re reading this, you’re here for the process.
Thanks for coming along.