Rugberry Universe

Merci Behaves Like a House, Not a Shop

Since 2009 Merci has filled a former fabric and wallpaper house in the Marais like a home, putting a canteen glass beside a vintage trolley. What a mixed room teaches about furnishing slowly.

Kolkata's Second Lives: Old Houses, a Jail and a Post Office

Kolkata rarely tears its old buildings down. It finds them new tenants: a century old house as a crafts store, a barrister's mansion as a cafe, a jail as a museum, a post office with coffee under i...

The Quiet Saudi House of Khaled Hashem

Khaled Hashem has built a practice in Jeddah around open plans, few objects and gallery like volumes. What minimalism means in a culture of generous hospitality.

Ajrakh: Indigo, Madder and a Village Rebuilt

Ajrakh is printed in reverse, with mud and lime resists and baths of indigo and madder over weeks. After the 2001 earthquake its printers named a new village after the cloth itself.

Tropical Modernism Began With Shade

Tropical modernism began as a colonial tool and was then claimed as the look of independence, from Ghana to Chandigarh. Why shade, air and local material were political before they were a style.

Bijoy Jain and the Studio Where Builders Draw

Studio Mumbai is admired as a near spiritual practice of earth, lime and bamboo. Its real subject is labour, and the people who make what Bijoy Jain designs.

Sangath, Doshi's Studio Pressed Into the Earth

B.V. Doshi set his own studio into the ground to escape the Ahmedabad heat and roofed it in vaults of white mosaic. Sangath argues that a modern building can be cool, communal and handmade.

Namda: Kashmir's Felted Rug and Its Second Life

A namda is never woven: wool is soaped, layered and pressed until the fibres lock, then embroidered. Its near collapse and a recent skilling push raise one question, whether training or steady orde...

Coffee, Brick and Teak in a Byculla Warehouse

Subko turned an abandoned printing press in Byculla's JAK Compound into a roastery of brick, teak and spotted marble. On adaptive reuse, craft and the line between reviving a place and dressing it.

Eileen Gray and E-1027, the Architect Who Began With Rugs

Before she built E-1027 on the rocks at Roquebrune, Eileen Gray ran a weaving workshop in Paris. The house reads differently once you know she began with the floor.

Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa's Fifty Year Garden

Geoffrey Bawa bought a rubber and cinnamon estate in 1948 and spent his life editing it into rooms of lawn, water and shade. The source text for tropical modernism, before the label.

Laurie Baker's Kerala, One Bare Brick at a Time

Laurie Baker spent four decades in Kerala asking whether each part of a building was necessary. His rat trap walls and brick jalis cost less and breathed better. A history of the idea behind the br...

Charlotte Perriand and the Art of Living Low

Charlotte Perriand is too often filed as a collaborator. Her own work, from bamboo shaped by a 1940 stay in Japan to the open kitchens of Les Arcs, argued that rooms should serve people.