Hanging Cabinet, Private Residence, Mumbai

A commission for a private residence in Mumbai, placed through the client’s interior designer. The client had commissioned the studio repeatedly before, for this house and for a second residence in London. The brief was a large wall piece to conceal a television in the living space, with one condition that governed the whole design: it had to be as resolved open as it was closed.

Reference images and material samples were exchanged with the designer to arrive at both the overall sculptural geometry and the relief worked into the surface. The reference was a painting, and specifically the brush stroke, which set the geometry of the piece and then the pattern across its face. The doors close on magnets, with tight concealed hinges, so the facade reads as a single unified plane with no indication that it opens. Opened, the doors fold back and the piece takes on a second geometry that answers the first rather than disrupting it. Neither state is the resting state. Both had to hold as sculpture on their own terms.

The pattern was set out by hand, drawn directly onto the finished doors as they lay flat on the workbench, then cut one stroke at a time with a handheld router to build the concentric overlapping strokes. Over 200 passes, each refined by hand after the machine had gone over it. Freehand routing carries an inconsistency that a CNC cannot produce and an accuracy that only comes from working slowly. Every pass is legible as a decision. The surface is not concealing how it was made but shows commitment and control.

Built in birch plywood, finished in butterscotch, completed in stages in the Montreuil atelier with the collaboration continuing throughout. The piece was hung and tested in the studio before being crated whole and installed on site in Mumbai.