This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and graphics.
I'm Mailie Evans.
We continue our roundup from the most recent edition of Maison Etcher, held in the French capital.
Amongst the dazzling array of wares shown on the trade floor was the launch of products in showrooms across Paris, and Niwa was one of them.
It's the first upholstered collection from Phantom Hands, a furniture maker based in Bangalore and was made in collaboration with the Swiss design studio Big Game.
We join Monocle's Paris bureau chief, Simone Bouvier at Phantom Hands showroom in Montmartre.
There he caught up with the co founder, Deepak Srinath.
It started with with exploring a quilted material for the sofa, but soon we figured out that quilting wasn't appropriate.
And there were several brands around the world that did a far better job of quilting than we can in India.
And then our eye fell upon a ubiquitous cotton tape called Navar that is found in India and used as sort of weaving material for daybeds.
It's used for multiple applications.
It is considered a very common, not very expensive material and certainly not something that one would consider as a luxury material.
The whole concept, we wanted the sofa to be rooted in India and specifically in this case, rooted in Indian fabric and textile history.
The sofa has an outer shell which is made by sewing together these Niwar cotton tapes into a hard jacket of sorts.
And the inner warm cocoon of the sofa is made with soft, luxurious linen.
You have this contrast between the harder, coarser cotton and the soft linen.
The incredible skill that our fabric collaborators brought into this project involves dyeing cotton and linen yarn and to make it look similar, which is incredibly tough to do.
And you've been so successful at it.
They look identical, even though the materials of the outer shell and the inner linen coco.