Step into a showroom today and you will see smooth greys, marble-topped counters, Scandinavian silhouettes. Nothing amiss except that in Kashmir, we were never grey.
We were walnut, indigo, copper. We were flower vines painted on ceiling walls, latticework screens filtering in sunlight, rooms constructed around congregating, quiet, snow.
At Design Ethos Developers, we don’t think Kashmiri design is about nostalgia. It’s about resistance to erasure, to sameness, to forgetting who we are.
In a world hurtling towards global templates, remembering your roots is a revolutionary act.
We have learned over time that local is backward or ethnic, neutral is classy, and imported is better. However, design never is neutral. Designing a white ceiling in place of a Khatamband is not because it’s better but because we didn’t get to see alternatives anymore. Globalisation tends to market monotony under the brand of minimalism.
Reclaiming Kashmiri aesthetics translates to why not a walnut carved door? Why not a mud-lime wall? Why do we have to conceal the Daand behind modular cabinetry? We don’t copy the past. We reinterpret it.
In our designs we apply hand-carved walnut details to contemporary furniture, we create Pinjrakari partitions for privateness and poetry, we finish walls in lime and mud, not plastic paint, and we orient homes around courtyards, attics, and niches.
Even the most minute movement such as employing Sozni patterns in tile work or saving a family’s ancestral beam becomes a strand in the identity.
We urge clients to look beyond Pinterest boards and consider what stories do you recall from your grandmother’s home? Which walls contained more than shelves or perhaps secrets? Which windows admitted not only air, but time? These discussions tend to result in the most personal, profound designs because they are rooted in memory, not magazines.
You don’t have to pick between past and present. This is the lie we resist: that Kashmiri aesthetics are of the past and that they won’t fit modern life.
We have established otherwise: A slim house with intelligent technology and a ceiling of hand-painted papier-mâché, a minimalist kitchen with a daan corner nestled within an alcove, and a child’s room with Wazwan stories painted above the bedhead. These are not contradictions. These are convergences.
At Design Ethos Developers, we design with meaning not only for comfort, but also for continuity.
In all the carved windows, all the Taaks, all the gentle niches that recall prayer or poetry, we say we are still here, still carving, still weaving, still designing and that in today’s age is resistance.