12 March,2025 09:38 AM IST | Mumbai | Dhara Vora Sabhnani
The gallery houses Shroff’s originals, and collaborative works with artists like T Venkanna. Pics/Ashish Raje
When architect and designer Rooshad Shroff moved back to Mumbai after living in the US for 10 years (and studying at Harvard's and Cornell Universities), he did not have much work to do in the initial days of his practice in 2011, and so he started making furniture to keep himself occupied. Around that time, mid-day had featured his first pieces that were displayed at Le Mill's Wadi Bunder store. Cut to 2025, Shroff has now opened Gallery RooshadSHROFF on the same floor of his Dubash House headquarters in Ballard Estate, to showcase his oeuvre and collaborative results of working with Indian artisans for over a decade.
Furniture has always been a passion-led project for Shroff. "When I first started researching different crafts of India to see how we can make them relevant to a modern design language and not just to use as ethnic souvenirs, I realised that there was no reference to craft. And it was all about the numbers game then; nobody wanted to touch those pieces. That pushed me to work with handmade objects and craft because we have access to great crafts that many don't value," says Shroff. Handmade objects have always appealed to him and the idea of craft is rooted in every piece he makes.
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Shroff considers furniture as a testing ground to research different techniques that don't just culminate to furniture, but also design accents such as surface cladding for his interior projects. As Shroff dedicated more time to his passion, it turned into a business, and people wanted to see his collectable designs. He moved out of his Horniman Circle office-studio space (in the erstwhile Louboutin office) last year, after having outgrown the space. Shroff will only use this gallery to showcase artist-artisan collaborations, and his pieces and not as a pop-up event space he says. "We don't expect a large footfall. We don't want a large footfall, but we want the right footfall. Many galleries support design in the West, but India doesn't really have any design galleries, we have art galleries, but not design," he says.
Shroff doesn't want the gallery to intimidate design lovers but to make them feel at home; you even ring a doorbell like at a friend's home. Sunlight bounces off the white walls and white mosaic floors which provide the perfect backdrop for the pieces, a mix of collaborations and his own. Like the Burma teak panels with marble inlay by T Venkanna, or the furniture collaboration with Tanya Goel. Pieces that he is also proud of are the ones that are a result of artist and artisan residency collaboration from Lucknow's Kalhath Institute (Shroff is on their advisory board) which invites fine artists for residency to explore embroidery as a medium. "Even the artworks are results of a residency. I collect art but didn't want to just put up frames to divert the viewer's attention from the crafts on display. This is a space dedicated to and is a celebration of handmade craftsmanship," he says.
Also on display are pieces from his Balance series, which uses onyx and travertine to play with light, sculpture and gravity. "I like to push the boundaries of material through furniture. Then if it sells, it sells. I want it to be the purest form of expressing who I am as a designer and what we kind of stand for, at the threshold of design and art. They are not always the most utilitarian pieces, but collectable designs."
Shroff has always worked at the grassroots level with artisans for his pieces and has a process. "We never design a collection and then go to the artisan to get it made. We first see what they are capable of doing, identify a craft, go to that cluster, and find an artisan who's willing to experiment, who has the patience to experiment with me to kind of deviate from what they are doing. That's how we train them; a lot of our smaller objects are a result of the training sessions. Once they reach a particular standard of quality, we push them to do something which they're not traditionally capable of doing while maintaining that same quality, to look beyond the ethnic nature of that craft. My marble lights are made by third generation murtikars," says Shroff, who sources the marble carving work in Jaipur, marble inlays from Agra and embroideries from Mumbai. He believes that the only way to sustain traditional crafts is to make them relevant.
"From Hermès to McQueen, and Chanel, everyone gets their pieces worked on in India but the brand's design identity is so strong that you'll never think that it's done by the same needle and thread. Design-led processes change the way in which a craft can be sustained," he sums up.
Gallery RooshadSHROFF
AT Third floor, Dubash House, JN Heredia Marg, Ballard Estate.
Time Monday to Friday, 11 am to 7 pm; Saturdays, by appointment only
Call 9833630201
