Can a limited-edition chair be your next big investment?

What do a Birkin, Chanel classic flap, and Lady Dior have in common? They are at the top of the investment handbag pyramid. If handbags can capture that ephemeral quality that overwhelms intrinsic value for perceived value, sofas, lamps, carpets, chairs, tables, dinnerware, and other home décor are not to be left behind either. Welcome to the ‘Is it design? Is it decor? Is it art?’ world of investment-worthy design collectibles.

Barely three months into 2025, and it’s been a busier-than-usual season for India’s design set—they made their presence first felt at the India Art Fair, followed by the India Design ID, which took place in Delhi last month. At each gathering, collectible designs showed up in big numbers. Outside too, they were unmissable. At the newly-opened Nilaya Anthology by Asian Paints, collectible design came in the form of a palm-shaped chair to a handpainted vase. It was seen in every object that was part of Eeshaan Kashyap’s table jewellery exhibition in Mumbai as well as in the obround mirrors and tables at the newly opened RooshadSHROFF Gallery in Mumbai. At each of these experiences, the main character was collectible designs. Think: limited-edition (read: expensive) home décor with a big personality and plenty of character. Here uniqueness, craftsmanship and utility unite to create conversation starters (at the very least) and objects of great investment value (hopefully in the long run). Buoyed by its international counterparts from the OG Collectible fair in Brussels in 2018, to Design Miami and even Salone del Mobile in Milan, collectible design is finally having a moment in India.

At India Art Fair, attendees witnessed the second edition of the collectible design pavilion, where India’s design superstars were lined up in a low-lit, ambient space. Aspura, a gallery for collectible carpets, made its debut with a triptych of carpets—an antique Kashan rug, a contemporary edition, and the newly commissioned photomosaic rug designed by artist Rashid Rana. At Shifting Horizons, Alaiia Gujral curated a show of emerging designers—Objectry, Creatomy, and Sage Living, among a dozen others. “Art is design and design is art,” says Gujral when asked about her experience of presenting design at an art fair. “It’s always a conversation—you never put up a painting without furniture and furniture without a painting.” 

At Design ID’s collectibles pavilion, Mumbai-based designer Ashiesh Shah showcased his dhoop table, an incense table cast in wrought iron, where smoke wafted through its eight holes on the top. On Instagram and at the show, it was a clear favourite. (And the table, along with Shah’s other craft-forward pieces such as the Channapatna chair and Naga bench have been showcased at the Paris Design Week, presented by The Invisible Collection). But the show stealer was a special exhibit titled Transition, where a ubiquitous everyday object was transformed into a museum-like display, with 45 of India’s leading creatives telling their stories of craft and design through 45 chairs.

Across the season, designers have reported strong sales and even healthier degrees of curiosity about collectibles. But they are quick to remind you that they’ve been working on this a long time now. “Two decades ago, when we started, there were few takers,” says Delhi-based designer Vikram Goyal, widely acknowledged as a pioneer in India’s collectible design space. Apart from showing at both IAF and Design ID, Goyal’s gallery at Nilaya Anthology was probably the most Instagrammed of spaces at the mammoth design store. “Now I’ve seen that there’s a great appreciation in value and prices. A lot of people want something that is locally made, and there’s great pride in good design that is coming out of India.”

Internationally acclaimed designer Gunjan Gupta, who’s also been at this since the mid-2000s, is thrilled to see collectible design “finally catch the imagination of a house-proud and India-proud generation.” Her Boriwala Bicycle Throne (2008), a chair inspired by India’s cyclewala vendors, now sits in the permanent collection of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. “Collectible design was born roughly 20 years ago, even though it existed in France way before. Designers like Garouste and Bonetti, and Les Lalanne, were experimenting with their artistic vocabulary for decades before the gallery world woke up to design as art in the early 2000s. All the designers we now see have emerged in the last 20 years,” she adds.

Perhaps it is due to this very nascence that everyone we speak with in the Indian design fraternity cautions against thinking of ‘collectability’ of design in the same way we think about art. “To call it collectible design, to some extent, also means it’s an investment piece, and the intention is to collect so you can sell,” observes Manju Sara Rajan, co-founder of the Bengaluru based studio Kaash. “Now is that possible? We’ll have to see because the collectible design secondary market is not yet established in India. [That can happen] when you have tightly numbered first editions of products, and those products have a certain provenance. I don’t know if we have matured enough,” she says. There are instances abroad of what can happen when maturity is achieved—take Australian designer Marc Newson’s ‘Lockheed’ lounge, a prototype of an aluminium and fibreglass chaise created in the 1980s, which fetched a whopping $3.7 million at auction in 2015.

Shroff notes that the value appreciation is real. “At the end of the day, it’s all about supply and demand, right?” he says. “But we’re still a nascent community and may not be designing keeping that in mind. We call it ‘collectible’ but it’s really a little bit more on the boutique side of design.” What connects India’s collectible designers is a deep, inescapable relationship with craft, as opposed to the West, where technology-based design and industrial production firmed up the industry. “Having anything that’s been made by hand is the ultimate luxury today. That is a chance for provenance, heritage, legacy—and all these abstract factors make these products special,” says Sara Rajan. 

Design collectibles are also timeless, in the sense that they can evoke a certain time but fit into the current landscape seamlessly. Their value and appeal only increases as it’s passed on from one generation to another. In the latest episode of Apple TV’s Severance, the Vitsoe 620 Chair Programme, designed in 1962 by German designer Dieter Rams, makes a debut, proving that the vintage piece of chair has the ability to effortlessly fit in with the dystopian show’s futuristic aesthetic.

What connects India’s collectible designers is a deep, inescapable relationship with craft, as opposed to the West, where technology-based design and industrial production firmed up the industry

Meanwhile, when Prateek Jain and Gautam Seth of Klove Studio launched Collektklove’s flagship store at Delhi’s Dhanmill compound last year, their intention was simply to evoke a sense of nostalgia and resonance with their signature hand-blown glass products, all while making them smaller (than their OTT chandeliers for example), and therefore more accessible. “Maybe it is because now the large-format homes are slowly giving way to more apartment living and people don’t really want a larger piece of sculpture in their homes, but they definitely enjoy smaller designed objects,” says Jain, who echoes what New York Times recently reported as a big art trend. Collektklove’s Ganeshas, kalashes, and nimbu mirchis aren’t limited-edition, but they are artisanal in the best sense of the word as they continue to work with the same community of glass-blowing experts who once did science lab production and have grown with the duo in the last two decades.

Goyal’s practice began with brass, in fact, because he noticed that there was a history of working with brass in India—it yielded spiritual vessels and decorative surfaces. “I liked the fact that we had a cultural heritage and people who could work with it.” Shroff, meanwhile, went through a process of unlearning after he began his studio in 2010—steeped as he was in Western ideas of minimalism at Parsons and Harvard. “I always looked at craft as a lot of embellishment that visually didn’t appeal to me,” he says. Once he understood the value, he focused on the “the techniques of making, and the elasticity of the material” to push certain boundaries—such as cantilevering wood or thinning down marble to such a degree that it allows light to pass through. “The idea is to really use the expertise of the artisans to produce pieces that stand in a very contemporary design world.”

Today, Indian design has gone through a huge personality change. “We have brands at all ends of the spectrum, not just the big ones, or ones that are producing for mammoth home projects, but also smaller galleries. You need to have people at all ends of the spectrum to keep things interesting,” says Sara Rajan. This spectrum, certainly, is growing, with the launch of design-focused galleries like Tarini Jindal Handa’s Aequo, the Chatterjee & Lal and Baro collaboration 47A, and most recently the Pavitra Rajaram-directed Nilaya Anthology. But given this is still fairly virgin territory, what advice do they have for those keen on collecting design?

“Look at the long term,” advises Gupta. “Imagine an object that’s going to last for 10 years. Design is about timelessness, not only about fine craftsmanship. Is the vocabulary original? Is it speaking about the culture? Is it talking about an ecosystem? Does it take you to a new place? If it does all of that for you at the moment, it will have relevance in the future.” Gujral agrees and adds, “You must love it. Don’t buy something because someone’s told you to buy it.” In a nutshell, it’s just like buying an investment handbag—you must love what you are buying, and you must be able to use it.