As restaurants continue to chalk up farm to table menus, hotels offer refillable toiletries and interior schemes focus on materiality and craft, the idea of conscious luxury continues to grow popular. Its a concept that Indian architect Bijoy Jain and his team of architects, engineers, carpenters and masons at Studio Mumbai have been practicing since 2005. Studio Mumbai’s distinctive blend of materials, Indian and Western cultures, tradition and modernity, have earned Jain a cult following among hoteliers, collectors and home owners the world over.
This year at Design Miami/Basel, Studio Mumbai’s second collection of limited edition furniture will appear with Brussels gallery Maniera. Gallery founder Amaryllis Jacobs launched a selection of pieces with Jain in Brussels in 2015 (some have ended up in SFMOMA in San Francisco, LACMA in Los Angeles and the Centre Pompidou in Paris), and will exhibit this new range at the Brussels space from 18 May.
Studio Mumbai Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai for Maniera.
This second show consists of 14 limited edition pieces that range from consoles to lights to chairs. ‘Each piece incorporates universal skills and distils them down to fundamentals,’ says Jain. ‘Anyone could make them, since they require no glues or power tools.’ (This is debatable. Few can match Studio Mumbai’s exquisite attention to detail and quality).
Like all of Studio Mumbai’s work, materials are key. They stretch from the rudimentary (stone, brick and cow dung) to the subtle (textiles, glass, natural pigments and lime). A wooden console is finished with Japanese washi paper panels, a buxom armchair is hewn from stone, and cane chairs are tied by hand.
Installation view of Studio Mumbai at Maniera Gallery.
‘None of these pieces are specific to India,’ says Jain. And neither is his studio. With projects in Japan and Europe already finished, next up are a slew of private homes across India, a hotel in Nice and a winery in the South of France.
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Studio Mumbai website and the Maniera website
ADDRESS
Maniera
27–28 Place de la Justice
Brussels 1000
Belgium
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