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Vaani B

@iamvaanib

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Founder @inaavtextiles
Connoisseur of material memory 📸

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Muslin was not sheer by accident.

The Mughals graded it as woven air, evening dew, running water. Rome was scandalised by it. We inherited a story about extravagance, about cloth made to be seen through.

But muslin came from the Bengal delta, where heat wraps around the body and the real problem is air against skin. The sheerness was the function. The cotton grew on one stretch of the Meghna. The thread was spun at dawn because it needed the river's humidity to hold together. The climate the cloth served was the climate that made it.

Every technical fabric today chases the specification a delta already perfected.

Full essay on the journal. Link in bio.

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I grew up in Chandigarh and I had no idea.

I did not know that perfect roads were not a given. That parks every few minutes were not something every city just had. That a government school being as good as a private one was not the standard everywhere. I thought this was simply how cities worked.

Everything was in its right place. Markets at the corner of every sector. No industries inside the city. No tall buildings interrupting a skyline that belongs to the hills. The roads were the same whether you lived in a government quarter or a larger house a few sectors over.

It never tried to be everything. Sukhna for a walk, the Rock Garden for a visitor, the gedi route for an evening when nothing needed to happen. That was enough, and enough done right is more than most cities manage with everything.

Full essay on iamvaanib. Link in bio.

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I moved to Calcutta a few years ago and the city completely undid me.

The buildings, the ghats, the light on the Hooghly at dusk. Every lane holding a story that nobody is telling loudly enough.

This piece is about what Calcutta already has, what it could become, and why the most interesting version of its future is not built from scratch.

It is already here. Waiting.

Read the full essay on my Substack. Link in bio.

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A wall, not a floor.

Moey Nelson always knew this piece wasn't meant to be walked on. It was meant to be seen, the way you see a painting, or a window, or anything that stops you when you enter a room.

She was right. Some rugs are too considered for the ground.

For Moey. After Ivan da Silva Bruhns' commission for the Maharaja of Indore, 1930.

If you have a space that needs a story, this is where it begins.
Link in bio → inaavtextiles.com

The Palace Bedroom · Part 9 of 9

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Because Manik Bagh is gone.

Demolished in stages, its contents sold at auction in Monaco, its palace turned into a Customs and Excise office. Most of what the Holkars built together exists now only in photographs and catalogue entries.

But the pattern survives. The geometry survives. The particular intelligence of a designer who understood that a rug is the ground everything else stands on that survives.

Our client Moey Nelson is a floral designer. Her studio is a space where beauty is taken seriously and arranged with intention, not unlike a certain bedroom in Indore, ninety years ago.

She didn't want a rug for the floor. She wanted it on the wall. A piece of history as the thing you see when you walk in.

That instinct is exactly right.

Part 8 of 9

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Ninety four years apart.
The same geometry.
Swipe to see the original da Silva Bruhns rug, now in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, beside the piece we made for our client.

We worked from archival photographs. Faded, shifted, filtered through decades of reproduction. We made decisions about colour, pile weight, knotting density, not to replicate exactly, but to honour the intelligence of the original.

The terracotta holds. The stepped border holds. The black lines moving across the surface like architectural drawing, those hold too.

Is it the same rug? No. It was made by different hands, in a different century, for a different room.
But the spirit that made someone commission it in 1930s.

The belief that a floor deserves the same rigour as a wall that is exactly the same.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 7 of 9

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A hand knotted rug cannot be photocopied.
Every knot tied individually. Tension in the weaver's hands changing through the day. Wool taking dye slightly differently across a skein.
These are not flaws. They are the signature of making.

Da Silva Bruhns made each of his rugs once. No two identical. What he was selling was not a pattern, it was a particular act of making, at a particular moment, by particular hands.
Ours is the same.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 6 of 9

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Every object in this room was chosen because it earned its place.

Tubular steel by Muthesius. Sculptures by Brancusi. Photographs by Man Ray. Silverware by Puiforcat.

And on the bedroom floor, a carpet by Ivan da Silva Bruhns. Geometric. Grounded. Structured like a building's foundation, not a painting placed horizontally.

This is the world our client asked us to reach back into.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 5 of 9

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Ninety years of fading. Archival photographs shot in low light, reproduced across decades, shifted in colour with every printing.

Matching the Holkars' rug is not a science. It is a negotiation between what the photograph shows and what the original must have felt like to stand on.

The terracotta.
The particular black.
The warm ground that makes the geometry breathe rather than press.
We hold samples in different light. We compare. We decide, not on accuracy, but on feeling.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 4 of 9

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She was 15 when she became Maharani.
By 24, she was being dressed by Schiaparelli and Vionnet, painted by Bernard Boutet de Monvel, and photographed by Man Ray.

Sanyogita Bai Holkar was not an accessory to the Manik Bagh story. She was its co author. The warmth inside that modernist rigour, the way the palace felt like a home and not a manifesto that was hers.
She died at 22, in Switzerland, from complications after an appendectomy.
After her death, the Maharaja spent almost no time in Manik Bagh.

Some rooms are built around a person. When that person leaves, the room never quite recovers.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 3 of 9

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He drove a Bugatti.
He wore Savile Row.
He filled his palace with Brancusi and Man Ray.

And yet most people have never heard of him.
Maharaja Yashwant Rao Holkar II of Indore built the most radical modern interior in 1930s Asia, not to impress, but because he genuinely believed this was how life should look.

Swipe to meet him.

The Palace Bedroom · Part 2 of 9

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A Maharaja.
A Bugatti.
And the most modern palace in 1930s India.

He was 21 when he became Maharaja of Indore.
By 30, Yashwant Rao Holkar II had built one of the most remarkable collections of modern art and design in the world, at a time when most of Europe was still catching up.

Manik Bagh, his palace in Indore, was not a royal residence in any traditional sense. It was a manifesto. Designed by the German architect Eckart Muthesius, furnished with pieces by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, and Ivan da Silva Bruhns, it was arguably the most avant-garde interior on the subcontinent in the 1930s.

He wasn't collecting status. He was collecting a vision of the future.

This is where our iconic commission begins.

The Palace Bedroom, for @moey_nelson

Part 1 of 9 A Maharaja. A Bugatti. And the most modern palace in 1930s India.

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