South Asian culture has never been about minimalism
On pattern, memory, and choosing things worth keeping.
I’ve always been drawn to the details that ask you to look a little longer: a border running around a quilt, a line of embroidery, the way a printed flower repeats without feeling entirely identical. Those are the things I wanted to make room for when I began House of Geru.
The title is a provocation, of course. South Asia holds many cultures and ways of living, including traditions of simplicity and restraint. No single decorating style could describe them all. But the idea that a considered home must be stripped of pattern leaves out so much of what makes these craft traditions worth knowing.
This is a starting point through a few traditions from India, Bangladesh and the Punjab region across India and Pakistan, rather than a portrait of the whole subcontinent. What draws me to them is how much an everyday object can hold: skilled work, a place, a story, and the possibility of years of use.
Pattern has something to say
Consider Kantha. In Bengal, including present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal, women traditionally layered worn cloth and stitched it into covers, mats and wrappers for the home. The designs might be simple flowers or elaborate scenes. Much of the material had already had a life before it became something new. Read the V&A’s account of Kantha.
There is a useful lesson here for anyone putting a home together. A piece can be practical, resourceful and richly decorated at the same time. Ornament does not have to mean excess spending or objects kept behind glass.
Phulkari offers another way of seeing it. Associated with the Punjab region across northern India and eastern Pakistan, it uses darning stitch and lustrous silk thread on cotton. In densely embroidered bagh pieces, stitching can cover nearly the entire ground. The V&A explains Phulkari and other embroidery traditions.
Look closely and the surface becomes a record of decisions: where a stitch turns, how a colour sits beside another, how a repeated form builds a larger composition. That attention is part of what we bring into a room.
These traditions have always had room to change
This Bengal coverlet, made around 1675–1700 for a European market, combines Indian embroidery with Persian-derived foliage and figures in European dress. It is a specific example of exchange, rather than evidence for how every household lived. It also complicates the idea that South Asian craft and Western interiors belong in separate worlds. Explore the coverlet at The Met.
Living traditions continue to change. Mithila painting, often called Madhubani painting, grew from women’s wall painting into a wider practice on paper. The Asian Art Museum’s exhibition Painting Is My Everything showed artists using this visual language to address personal experience and contemporary events alongside religious subjects. Meet the tradition and its artists.
When buying a painting, I would want to learn who made it and what they chose to express. Calling everything “ethnic art” loses the person at the centre of the work.
A layered home can still feel calm
You don’t need to recreate a historic interior, or fill every surface, to live with these pieces. Start with the object you keep returning to. Give it enough space to be seen.
A printed bedcover can sit against plain sheets. An embroidered cushion can bring detail to a simple sofa. A painting can have a wall to itself. Repeating one colour elsewhere in the room can help different pieces feel at home together, while a plain rug gives the eye somewhere to rest.
I like rooms that can change as their owners do. Leave room for a piece you haven’t found yet, something already in the family, or an object whose meaning takes time to become clear.
What is worth bringing home?
Begin with use. A quilt you reach for each evening has a different kind of value from something bought only to complete a photograph. Then look for substance: materials you understand, sound construction, a maker or workshop the seller can identify, and care instructions you can realistically follow.
A smaller original work by an artist you want to follow may mean more than a large anonymous reproduction. A well-made textile may earn its place through years of washing and use. Neither needs to be described as a future heirloom before it has had the chance to become one.
That is the home I have in mind for Geru: a place where handmade details are part of daily life, and where keeping something begins with wanting to use it.