Ashiesh Shah Feels that Quiet Luxury in India is Rooted in the Time and Pay of the Karigars

Ashiesh Shah's trajectory reads like a string of milestones. His work combines geometry, perspective, aesthetics, integrity, and minimalism while helping preserve traditional Indian craftsmanship. He is relentless when it comes to envisaging a creative ecosystem. Time and again, he has proven that passion and creativity know no boundaries.

He is also the dentist (by educational background), who is not only the creative force behind the houses of India’s leading celebrities, including Ranbir Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Aditya Roy Kapoor, among others, but is also one of the most influential architects/designers of the country. Ashiesh comes from a family of doctors, so the path into dentistry was influenced by that. But quietly, alongside that, he had a creative current. “I was the child who drew instinctively, who noticed form and proportion before I understood what they meant. Dentistry taught me discipline and the intimacy of working with detail, but my imagination kept leaning toward space, material, and atmosphere. Design felt like a return to something I had always been: an artist at heart, simply finding the right medium.”

Shah dons many hats. He is an architect, a designer, a collector, and a curator. But who is he, really? "They’re not separate identities for me; they’re one way of seeing, expressed through different formats. Architecture teaches me to think in systems, in space, in permanence. Design allows intimacy, tactility, and objects that live close to the body. Collecting keeps me in constant conversation with history and with what endures. Sometimes they disagree in tempo: architecture moves slowly, collecting is instinctive, design is iterative, while curating is editorial. But that friction is productive. It keeps the practice honest. The through-line is still the same: a commitment to material intelligence, craft legacy, and an aesthetic that doesn’t need loudness to be present," he says.

RR: What is your take on Wabi-Sabi — the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete?

AS: As we understand, Wabi Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy. In layman’s language, it is more organic than overly polished. Wabi-Sabi is not an aesthetic layer that he applies; it is the way that he looks at the world. The challenge is that luxury, by default, is often associated with polish and permanence, whereas Wabi-Sabi asks you to value the raw, the transient, the evolving. I integrate it by prioritising material integrity and emotional depth over perfection. I’m interested in surfaces that age, in textures that gather time. In practice, that means allowing stone to be porous, wood to retain its grain, plaster to carry its hand. It also means designing in a way that is site-specific, so every space has its own quiet narrative rather than a replicated ideal.

RR: What does quiet luxury mean to you? Where do you think it converges with Indian craftsmanship?

AS: “Quiet luxury” in India is the opposite of spectacle. It is rooted in time, the hours and sometimes years it takes to make a piece, and in fairness, how much the karigar takes back home. If the artisan’s share is 30–40%, that begins to feel like true luxury. If it is 10%, we are only using the name of craft, and that becomes abusive. Quiet luxury can’t be tokenism, and it can’t be relocated into a city workshop without losing its soul. It is the confidence of restraint, the dignity of material, the intelligence of handwork, and the final barometer is aesthetics.

RR: What was it like showcasing at the Paris Design Week? It was your debut.

AS: Presenting in global contexts like Paris Design Week has been encouraging because Indian craft now arrives as contemporary, intelligent, and essential. International audiences respond deeply to the honesty of handwork and the emotional warmth of our materials. It confirms that a hyper-local approach can create a universal resonance. Our work can be seen with Invisible Collection and the Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

RR: Which collaboration became one of the most powerful stories for you?

AS: Swadesh Café, in collaboration with NMACC (Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre), is one of them. It was important to me because the entire project was genuinely craft-driven, not craft as decoration, but craft as the story, the atmosphere, and the soul of the space. It felt like a complete, honest narrative of India’s making traditions in a contemporary setting. And the G20 was transformative. It carried a different kind of responsibility — a moment where design became cultural soft power. The scale and the stakes made it deeply personal, and I felt proud of what the storytelling represented for India.