Rooshad Shroff’s new exhibit is like a trip to a Zen garden

Most architects credit nature as their biggest inspiration. Often you hear how the direction of the sun influenced a layout or the colour of a tree inspired a palette in a living room. Still others talk about how they kickstart projects by investigating an aspect of the natural landscape, and by the end, come up with a design that is, in many ways, an artistic homage to it. This is, oddly, not how Rooshad Shroff arrived at the aesthetic of his new furniture collection, Balance, currently on display at Mumbai’s IF.BE gallery.

Shroff chose a more craft-forward, process-driven approach for his designs, which involved a lot of abstract doodling, sculpting, metal casting, and 3D modelling. In 2021, he launched the original Balance side table in wood and marble—and has spent the last three years meticulously developing the collection as an investigation into how different materials would respond to the same form. But with a collection that is soft, curved and strikingly delicate, the Mumbai-based architect and designer has still arrived at a showcase that feels like an ode to a hauntingly serene Tolkien-esque forest.

You won’t see the Makrana marble that Shroff has made his signature, at least not in this new showcase of furniture (though chips of marble and semi-precious stone are piled into little gravel dunes across the floor of the gallery, acting as islands on which the collection is displayed). In this collection, we see him experiment with metal for the first time—specifically, white bronze, which he leaves unlaminated so that it naturally patinates over time. Its influence is only secondary to onyx, which dominates the Balance collection in shades of white, pink, and green.

The latest showcase includes a console, a coffee table, lamps, vases, wall lights, as well as many iterations of the original side table, this time in onyx and white bronze. Everything is curvilinear, cantilevered, and precarious—the collection has all the soft curves and fragility you’d see in a stack of balancing rocks, but with the sort of eerie robustness you’d associate with Stonehenge. 

There’s fabric too—primarily cotton thread and cashmere, woven into carpets or upholstered onto pebble-shaped sofas and ottomans. Metal and polished stone constantly reflect off each other and off the pool-like mirrors that Shroff has scattered across the floor and on the walls to help guide our eye. Hand-embroidered curtains, drawn across the room to reveal only one piece at a time, shimmer like waterfalls. It’s weird—in the best way—to be among objects that were borne out of near-superhuman skill (if you want a sense of how intense the stone carving process is, this video gives you a good idea), and yet look like something you’d find in nature, as if they had been sitting there, poised in precarious harmony, for thousands of years.

“Being an architect, I’m quite interested in form, shape, structure, and seeing how we can push the boundaries of certain materials to be in a particular way,” shares Shroff, who worked on the collection with artisans in Jaipur and Mumbai. “In all our collections, there’s always a very process-driven approach, and in this particular case, it was about finding the right centre of gravity, making sure that the pieces seemed unstable or delicate, but were actually robust enough to be used as utilitarian pieces in the end.” It’s hard to imagine even placing so much as a glass of water at the edge of his console, given its delicate frame—but Shroff assures me I could even stand on it.

The collection was set to launch in March this year, but postponed because, well, process. “It was more about a very formal exploration in the beginning,” Shroff admits. “We didn’t know what would become what piece—certain things just evolved. We changed the date for the show to October, thinking nine months would give us more time, but over those nine months, we just added more things to the collection.” That’s probably why this collection seems so conceptually connected to nature—even without a grain of wood or leaf motif in sight. Not in aesthetic, not in inspiration—but in process, Shroff mirrors the creative forces of the natural world, where nothing is planned, but everything somehow falls into place.      

Balance is on view at IF.BE in Mumbai until October 12, 2024