Hold the door: There’s a new anchor piece taking the spotlight in interior design. And no, it isn’t a Labubu-inspired couch (yet). At India Design ID Mumbai, we witnessed the humble, hardworking cabinet get a glow-up. The closets, sideboards and bar units inside which live your finest china, rarest Scotch, and best-preserved vinyls (and who knows, your deepest, darkest secrets?) are no longer content at fitting in or being the afterthought, the follower, the conformist. Instead, they are now being refashioned into artistic statement pieces, more than willing to dominate dinner conversation.
“Globally, cabinets are being treated as sculptural objects where materiality and form take centre stage. It’s a shift toward living with pieces that express personality and presence, not just function,” says Jagdish Sutar, founder of the eponymous design company based in Pune and Milan. This is most true of his own Art Deco-inspired limited-edition cabinet, Grain of Time. The reclaimed teakwood, foil-covered cabinet with a linear top and a fluted base grabbed much attention despite (or perhaps because of) its quiet poise in a far corner of fair director Misha Bains’-curated Neo Deco showcase, which paid tribute to 100 years of the Art Deco movement.
“I see three clear trends emerging,” says Bains, “Sculptural forms that blur the lines between furniture and art; material juxtapositions, ie, wood conversing with metal, glass or stone; and a renewed focus on craft details like joinery and inlay that elevate these products to the status of collectible design.” All of this means one thing—the element of surprise—and we found it everywhere: in a sabai grass-panelled wooden sideboard from This & That x Boito’s Niraba collection thatpays tribute to Odisha’s deep history of craftsmanship and in a wood and pyrite cabinet from DeMuro Das limited edition FLUX series. There were bar units that looked like giant shiny crystal balls (Nitush-Aroosh), others inspired by the samovar and the African grey parrot (DTale Modern x Rajnish Hedao) and another futuristic pick in the form of a Baroque beast inspired by the myth of Adamastor (Scarlet Splendour x André Teoman).
French cabinetmaker André-Charles Boulle might have been enchanted with this home object, but since your home is not the Palace of Versailles, how do you ensure that the previously self-effacing cabinet’s current main-character energy doesn’t clash with the rest of your room? “I suggest treating them as an anchor in a room, and layering them with objects that echo their character,” suggests Bains. “Less is more,” says Sutar, adding that a collectible cabinet “works beautifully with clean architectural lines, muted tones, a few considered accents, a sculptural light or a single artwork so the cabinet holds its presence without visual noise around it”.
