"Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation." - James Turrell
Itmenaan (इत्मीनान)
Contentment, in objects - Launched September 2022
Opaque Studio (Colorhouse Living) · Greater Noida · 2022
Solo Project · 2 months · Handcrafted by Opaque's Artisans
Itmenaan is a collection of lamps, lighting fixtures, and candle holders designed during a two-month internship at Opaque Studio, a Greater Noida studio that works with artisans across India and refuses to mass-produce anything. The brief was a fusion: Indian craft and wood, in a clean mid-century form. What that meant in practice was cane, bamboo, and teak resolved into objects where the weave is the design rather than decoration on it, drawn to the tenth of an inch, handed to a lathe artisan, and launched that September.
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The Studio
Success tastes best when it's collaborative.
Opaque Studio makes furniture, home décor, and accessories, founded by Kritika Gattani in 2019, running a 10,000 sq ft factory in Greater Noida with a team of sixteen, serving cafés, co-working spaces, and homes alike.
The materials are sustainable and natural: terracotta, wood, jute, cotton, cane. Every product is handcrafted by artisans across India who, as the studio puts it, add a touch of their own emotion to each piece.
Sustainability here is enforced by refusal. Nothing is mass-produced, a deliberate stand against fast furniture. And one rule shaped my work directly: every design must carry at least one Indian craft. For Itmenaan, that craft was Channapatna woodturning and it's the reason the collection is built the way it is.
Itmenaan
Contentment, in objects
Opaque Studio (Colorhouse Living) · Greater Noida · 2022
Solo Project · 2 months
Itmenaan is a collection of lamps, lighting fixtures, and candle holders designed during a two-month internship at Opaque Studio, a Greater Noida studio that works with artisans across India and refuses to mass-produce anything. The brief was a fusion: Indian craft and wood, in a clean mid-century form. What that meant in practice was cane, bamboo, and teak resolved into objects where the weave is the design rather than decoration on it, drawn to the tenth of an inch, handed to a lathe artisan, and launched that September.
Cane, bamboo, and teak wood, in natural finishes.
Trend research, ideation, 3D modelling, technical drawings, and production follow-through.
A two-month summer internship, from first sketch to finished product.
Lamps and lighting fixtures fusing Indian craft with wood. Clean aesthetics, sustainable, multi-utility.
The Making
The drawing is the conversation. The artisan is the other half of it.
Master sheets play a crucial role in production, they often go directly to the artisan, and there are times when you aren't there to answer questions. Making them as basic, clear, and complete as possible becomes essential. Four processes carried the collection from page to object
The Sheet
Draw for the person who will build it, not the person who will grade it.
Master sheets play a crucial role in production, and they often go directly to the artisan, there are times when you simply aren't there to answer questions. That makes clarity a design responsibility, not an afterthought. Each sheet carried top, side, and front views; dimensions in inches; material calls; colour and finish; metal frame specs; bulb sizing; and lathe profiles. Learning to draw for someone working from the page alone was the sharpest skill this internship gave me.
Sourcing
The material decides what the drawing can promise.
Before anything could be made, it had to be found, fabric sourcing, wood sourcing, and the discovery that a specification is only as good as what's actually available. One shade was drawn around an eight-inch globe bulb that had yet to be sourced. Designing slightly ahead of your own parts is a normal condition of production, not a mistake, but it changes how you write a spec.
The Lathe - Khairad
Where a drawing becomes a profile.
Experimenting with shapes and forms on the lathe was the most enjoyable part of the project. It was also where I first negotiated directly: dealing with lathe artisans alone, to get a product made at a set cost, has its own story. Every curve on a spec sheet had to survive both the turning and the conversation about what that turning would cost.
The Weave
Where the light is made
Cane and bamboo do the real work of this collection. The weave is not a surface on the object, it is the object, and it's what turns a bulb into a pattern on a wall. Different densities, different ring structures, different mesh scales: each one changes the shadow more than any change of form ever could.
The Screen Print
One print, many products
Screen printing was new to us. The challenge was completing a single print that could run across numerous designs in the range, working inside real colour restrictions and learning how the frames function. Watching the process in action was a treat, and a reminder that surface decoration has its own hard engineering behind it.
The Frame
The skeleton beneath the surface
Marana needed a brass ring of 6.5 cm, a size the world refused to sell me. I tried annealing and stretching a smaller ring; it failed. So I forged my own: a solid brass rod, annealed and stretched over a ring base by hand. The first, at 5 mm, spun too heavily; I remade it at 3.5 mm for speed and grace. The labour taught me how brass yields under heat and resists under stress and left me surer of my own hands.
The Finish
Natural, and left that way
Every piece in the collection was specified as natural finish, no stain hiding the grain, no colour covering the weave. In a collection built on texture, the finish's job was to protect the material and then get out of the way. Restraint at the last step is what lets the craft stay visible
A drawing is only a wish until someone's hands agree to it.
To Kritika Gattani, and
to the artisans of Opaque, who built what I drew.
Two weeks of shoots and styling because once the collection existed, it had to be photographed into desire.
What I Learned
A design student thinks one way. Production thinks another.
Every piece in this collection had its own share of ups and downs, different techniques, different processes, its own story. Negotiating with lathe artisans to hit a set cost. Watching a screen print come off the frame. Learning how a metal frame gets powder-coated before it can be woven. Each step was a small correction to how I thought design worked.
The biggest of those corrections was about the drawing. I had been taught to draw for a critique, to communicate an idea to someone who already shares your vocabulary. Here, the sheet went straight to an artisan I'd never met, who would build from the page alone. That reframed the technical drawing from a documentation exercise into the actual design work. Clarity stopped being good practice and became a form of respect.
Working in a co-working space put me among people with entirely different minds and cultures. As a design student you may think one way, but the reality is very different and that gap is where the actual learning happened.
Theme & Material
Bohemian and mid-century, told in weave, wood, and eight quiet tones.
The theme. The brief called for bohemian and mid-century, two languages that agree on more than they disagree. Mid-century gives the collection its clean lines, tapered legs, and honest proportion; bohemian gives it texture, warmth, and the licence to let a handmade weave stay visibly handmade, room for Indian craft to sit inside a contemporary silhouette without looking like decoration applied to it.
The material. Three, chosen for what each does best.
Cane combines simplicity and comfort with high aesthetic appeal, its earthy, natural appearance giving an urban, contemporary look. Bamboo brought the wider weaves and ring structures, fast-growing, renewable, and strong enough to hold a shade at scale. Teak anchored everything, turned on the lathe for bases, collars, and candle stands, it gave the collection its weight and its grain, and was the only material here that could hold a Channapatna profile. All three are sustainable and natural, non-negotiable at a studio that refuses to mass-produce.
The asking. Can a craft survive a contemporary form? Can Indian handcraft live inside a clean mid-century silhouette without being reduced to ornament and can a weave, which needs a frame, become the object rather than the decoration on it?
Fifty Forms
What can a weave hold?
Ideation moved fast and wide, dozens of concepts pairing wooden and lathe-turned bases with shades in cane mesh, bamboo rings, pleated fabric, and embroidered textile. Globe bulbs suspended inside cane spheres. Drum meshes that rotate.
Bamboo bowls, mesh plates, planters doubling as storage, miniature cabinets serving as candle stands.
The recurring problem was structural, not decorative: a weave needs a frame. Every promising silhouette had to resolve how wood, metal, and cane would hold each other, which is where the sketching stopped and the drawing began.
And so the light stays on.