Why Ashiesh Shah is in the Design 100

Ashiesh Shah founded his Mumbai atelier in 2017 as both a design studio and a working archive of Indian craft, rather than a practice built around one signature material. Furniture, lighting and objects move through cast bronze, hand-worked stone and fired clay, each made with a different community of artisans, so the atelier reads as an ongoing survey of what that craft can still do.

Architectural Digest India has named him among the fifty most influential figures in the country’s architecture and design in multiple years, and in 2022 he became the first Indian designer represented by the collectible design gallery The Invisible Collection, placing his objects alongside work bought and shown as art. Interiors including Neuma in Mumbai and a house in Delhi’s Shantiniketan enclave carry the same material language into finished rooms, with a solo exhibition of new work currently on show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London.