What the practice does
Direct Create Projects is the advisory practice of Cultural Intelligence. On every engagement the practice operates as the cultural intelligence layer alongside the design team. It researches, synthesizes, frames, recommends, and guides. It does not design interiors, does not fabricate, and does not manage construction. The relationship to the architect or the design team is parallel rather than hierarchical.
The product is a Culture Stack, a place-and-purpose study a designer builds on. The process that produces it is Culture Stacking. Its stages move from scoping through fieldwork and mapping to argument and edition, and the same discipline runs across hospitality, residential, institutional, retail, and publication work. The vertical changes. The method holds.
What follows is the record across four eras, from a furniture factory in Jaipur to a tower designed by Foster and Partners in Worli. Each project below carries its own page with the brief, the cultural findings, and the evidence.
The arc of the work
Lifestyle design and craft retail, 2009 to 2014
The practice’s instincts formed before Direct Create had a name. Vistaap Furnitures, run out of Jaipur from 2009 under Rajeev and Sheela Lunkad’s studio The Human Project, turned a single governing idea, that India needed a lifestyle vocabulary read from its own climate, anthropometrics, and culture rather than imported from abroad, into a working factory. Its modular cabinet systems and nail-less joinery pursued industrial repeatability without losing a handmade material aesthetic, a thesis built years before large-format lifestyle retail had proven itself in India.
Two engagements in the same window carried the thesis into built and commissioned work. At Kalyan Mart in Jaipur, Direct Create held the credited role of artistic direction and cultural manager alongside the architect OBR from 2012, on a facade OBR itself described as a reinterpretation of the Lehariya textile pattern and as a building made by Jaipur rather than for it. And in October 2010, a retail strategy for the Jal Mahal precinct in Jaipur asked what a craft bazaar beside a restored monument would carry, working from the customer and the category down to the named craft. That bazaar was never built, but the sequence it followed, from market to customer to category to craft, resurfaces eight years later at Reliance’s Swadesh Bazaar and remains legible in the practice’s craft-retail work since.
Curation at national scale, 2017 to 2019
By 2017 Direct Create was operating at retail-network scale. The Fabindia engagement, the practice’s longest commercial relationship, ran from May 2017 through July 2018 and built the production system behind Fabindia’s own five-bucket style taxonomy of power, efficiency, luxury, texture, and sustainability, applied across furniture, glassware, tableware, and textiles. A parallel cultural-positioning session in July 2018 argued that Fabindia should read as “the custodian of the many Indias that make our home,” a line that named the plurality argument the practice would keep making for the next decade.
In December 2018, Reliance Retail’s Swadesh Bazaar and 108 Crafts of India took the same instinct to the largest curatorial mobilization in the practice’s archive: more than three hundred artisans across twenty states, a seventy-nine-entry craft master list organized into six pavilions, and a network of more than fifty curators and domain specialists, delivered across a compressed ten-week arc inside Udaipur’s City Palace complex. The same year, the Bacardi glassware collaboration carried the brand’s own Bat Symbol heritage into a craft-led production and documentary film, an early instance of the heritage-research-first method the practice would carry into every subsequent brand and institutional brief.
Advisory cultural intelligence, 2020 to 2023
The next era moved the practice from retail curation into standing advisory relationships at the highest institutional register. From March 2021, Direct Create contributed decorative direction to HCP’s New Parliament Building at Central Vista in New Delhi, working across the Constitution Hall, the ceremonial chambers, and the stone jali program that runs through the building’s facade and interior thresholds, under an aesthetic layer explicitly built over HCP’s own architecture. From December 2021, Taj Resort Puri became the practice’s canonical hospitality Culture Stack, a four-phase method running from an Odisha craft map of twelve material categories to specified Dhokra, Kotpad, and Pattachitra commissions, built alongside HBA and Vanam Landscape Architects. Across the same years, the Jal Mahal book, commissioned by KGK Group with Roli Books, carried the Mansagar restoration into the practice’s longest-form publication, launched at the Humayun’s Tomb Museum in March 2025.
The Culture Stack, 2023 to 2026
The fourth era gave the method its name and its deepest single deliverable. The Birla Estates programme opened at Riverside in Sangamwadi, Pune in June 2023 with a Culture Stack reading Pune through its Maratha heritage, its Paithani weaving discipline, and the Ganpati festival cycle, and extended through Sector 71 and Arika in Gurgaon and Badarpur in Delhi, before reaching its benchmark form at Niyaara Phase 2 in Worli, a study for a tower by Foster and Partners, delivered in May 2025. In the same window, the Dadar Edit proved that the method compresses to the scale of a single object, three carpets for Broadway Malyan’s Mumbai studio, and the Bhadohi carpet from that commission traveled again into Coforge and IIT BHU’s Brahma AI Lab in Varanasi. Future of Tradition, the practice’s own published platform, opened in August 2024 to give the method a public vocabulary, and Alila Fort Coorg, live through 2026, is applying it to Kodagu’s Kodava cultural substrate and Western Ghats ecology as the practice’s current flagship engagement. Separately, in 2025 and 2026, BITS Pilani commissioned the practice to codify the proportional grammar hidden in its own 1920s heritage buildings, evidence that the underlying method, surfacing a place’s embedded intelligence before development overrides it, generalizes past cultural and ethnographic research into architectural analysis itself.
Case studies by field
Craft retail and the many Indias
Fabindia and Reliance asked the same underlying question from different scales. Fabindia wanted its artisan-sourced home category to read as a coherent retail proposition rather than a diffuse craft catalog. Reliance wanted a symbolic number, a hundred and eight, turned into a working bazaar for three thousand guests inside a historic palace complex. Direct Create’s reading in both cases was that India resists a single retail voice. At Fabindia, the practice’s July 2018 positioning session argued the brand should hold itself as “the custodian of the many Indias that make our home,” benchmarked against Muji, Vitra, and Shanghai Tang, and built the five-bucket production system, power, efficiency, luxury, texture, and sustainability, that let that plurality run through furniture, tableware, and textiles without flattening into one brand voice. At Reliance, the idea was to let the number one hundred and eight organize twenty states of craft into six pavilions by material register rather than by region, so a guest moved from Krishna’s devotional paintings to the northeast’s bamboo basketry without the show ever resolving into a single national style. What exists today is Fabindia’s in-store rollout of September 2018 and the Swadesh Bazaar’s own consolidated book, produced in October 2018. What it taught the practice is that a curatorial number, handled with rigor, becomes an operating architecture rather than a decoration, a lesson first sketched in the 2010 Jal Mahal retail study and carried again, at the scale of a single address, into Niyaara.
Nation and institution
At the New Parliament Building, HCP and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs needed a decorative programme that could hold at three levels simultaneously, visual richness, cultural legibility, and political defensibility, for a legislature under public scrutiny. Direct Create’s cultural reading treated heritage codification at the seat of national power as inherently contested ground, and built its decorative direction accordingly: the Ashoka emblem and chakra, Yaksha-Yakshini iconography, the Districts of India motif band, and a Diversity Gallery craft reference archive of more than two hundred cataloged objects, all built to survive scrutiny from the architectural team, the ministry, and the artisan ecosystem at once. The stone jali program, running across the facade and the interior thresholds of the Constitution Hall, was the largest sustained body of the work, from June 2021 through the building’s inauguration in May 2023 and beyond. At BITS Pilani, the question was narrower and no less exacting. Seven decades of construction had implicitly honored a proportional grammar set by campus planner Sukhdev Pande and architect W.W. Wood in the 1920s, and new buildings were starting to drift from a logic no one could any longer read. Direct Create’s contribution was to decode that grammar, from the colonnade arch to a four-level opening hierarchy running from ventilation jalis to monumental gateways, and publish it as a working framework, taught to the campus’s own architects in a half-day workshop in 2025. What both engagements taught is that restoration framing, surfacing the embedded intelligence a place already carries, holds whether the substrate is festival ecology or a hundred-year-old campus module.
Heritage and water
The question at the Jal Mahal was never only architectural. The palace, a derelict pavilion on a lake that had become a sewage basin by the late 1990s, needed its water restored before its stone meant anything. The reading that runs through the whole record, and that Direct Create carries as its own lesson, is that a monument and its water body are a single object, and that watershed thinking has to precede monument thinking. The lake’s revival ran through nalla diversion, full desilting, a constructed wetland supplying seven million liters a day of treated make-up water, and the planned return of native flora and fauna, work substantially completed through the 2010s. The idea carried forward from the 2010 retail study was that a restored precinct could also carry a craft economy, in copper kalash finials worked in twenty-two carat gold leaf by a Jaipur thathera family of three to four generations, in Firozabad glass finials engineered for the lake-facing fountains, and in the ceremonial boat fleet carved by a named team under guild head Nahata ji. What exists today is the restored monument and lake, and the Jal Mahal book, published with Roli Books and launched at the Humayun’s Tomb Museum in Delhi in March 2025 alongside the Aga Khan Development Network’s heritage community. What it taught the practice, carried forward explicitly into Birla Niyaara’s own “Heritage Pond Is Raw Gold” argument a decade and a half later, is that a monument’s water is never a footnote to its stone.
Homes and cities, the Birla Culture Stacks
Birla Estates brought the same underlying question to five different cities, asking what makes this address specific rather than generic. At Riverside in Pune, the 2023 research read the site through its river confluence, its Peshwa-era Maratha heritage, the Paithani saree’s discipline of pattern and proportion, and the Ganpati festival’s river-immersion cycle. At Sector 71 in Gurgaon, the “Roots to Sky” argument refused the assumption that Gurgaon is a cultural void, locating its identity instead in the Haryanvi village substrate the city’s towers now stand on. At Arika, also in Gurgaon, the same 2024 research substrate resolved into a single commissioned sculpture rather than a diffused decorative programme. At Badarpur in Delhi, working alongside Morphogenesis, the practice’s most site-specific material argument surfaced Badarpur quartzite itself, quarried from the Delhi ridgeline and already present in the fourteenth-century Tughlaqabad Fort six kilometers away, as a marker of geological and architectural continuity rather than borrowed palatial imagery. The deepest deliverable of the five came at Niyaara in Worli, a study reading Mumbai as accumulation, seven islands unified by land reclamation, layered with the mill district’s textile heritage and the Warli folk-art tradition, and arguing that the site’s heritage pond is raw gold, the Jal Mahal’s lesson returned at the scale of a single address. What the five engagements together taught the practice is that a residential brief, handled with the same rigor as a museum brief, yields a defensible cultural position rather than a decorative theme.
Hospitality
Taj Resort Puri and Alila Fort Coorg asked hospitality’s characteristic question in two different registers, how a resort belongs to its specific place rather than to luxury hospitality in general. At Taj Puri, from December 2021, Direct Create mapped Odisha’s craft register across twelve categories, from Pattachitra’s Raghurajpur lineage to Cuttack silver filigree, and translated the map into specified commissions, Dhokra drawer pulls and a lead Dhokra Fish artwork, Kotpad cushions, carved sandstone pieces, proven first in a single Mockup Room before it scaled across the property. At Alila Fort Coorg, live through 2026, the practice reads two directions at once, a rooted Kodava cultural world of ancestor worship, the okka clan structure, and the ainmane house form, and a Western Ghats naturalist register of shola forest and elephant corridor, converging on a shared coffee-and-honey agricultural thread. Both engagements ran the same underlying structure, a cultural intelligence layer sitting alongside an owner, an operator, and a design team rather than under any one of them, first rehearsed at Taj Puri and now standard practice.
Workplace and technology
Coforge and IIT BHU asked a question with no obvious craft answer, how an artificial intelligence research lab, built inside an existing teaching center on the Banaras Hindu University campus, carries the weight of a university founded in 1916 on the explicit synthesis of eastern and western knowledge. Direct Create’s reading named the lab Brahma, after the university’s own founding ambition, and ran its Three-Sphere Framework as design-process scaffolding rather than essay-level argument, from BHU’s sacred Kashi geography and rising-sun campus orientation through to the smart systems the lab would run. The idea that gave the project its material specificity was a portable one. The Bhadohi hand-tufted carpet Direct Create had commissioned for Broadway Malyan’s Mumbai studio, Dadar Scape, was carried unchanged into the Varanasi lab as a reference to the Mithi River meeting the sea, alongside two new pieces, a ceiling installation reading Kashi’s temple geometries as neural-network patterning and a geometric woven panel pairing ancient Indian binary systems with a Ganga-ghat palette. What it taught the practice, concluded across five design iterations between November and December 2024, is that its own craft commissions are not single-client property. They travel.
Objects and places
Broadway Malyan asked Direct Create to translate the cultural memory of Dadar, in Mumbai, into floor surfaces for the firm’s own working studio. The practice’s reading was that Dadar’s four-century arc from fishing village to financial capital resists a single narrative, so it commissioned three carpets in three crafts rather than one: Dadar Scape, an 18-by-10-foot Bhadohi hand-tufted map of Mahim Bay woven by Raj Kumar’s workshop; Maxim Bay Mosaic, a Kharad oval from Samarth Tejsi’s family workshop in Bhuj; and La Deco Mumbai, a Panja dhurrie from Shankar Lal Mali’s loom in Dausa, its geometry drawn directly from the Art Deco ironwork of Dadar’s Parsi Colony. What exists is the finished collection, delivered in August 2024 and installed in the firm’s Bandra Kurla Complex studio. What it taught the practice, tested again three months later at the Brahma AI Lab, is that Culture Stacking holds at the scale of a single commissioned object as cleanly as it holds at the scale of a hotel, and that a generative-image sketch can serve a designer’s research without ever substituting for the maker’s hand.
Celebrations
The City Palace projection prepared for a February 2025 KGK family wedding in Udaipur was a narrower brief than any other engagement in the record, a facade light show, roughly three hours across the celebration, evaluated and directed by Direct Create against a storyboard the practice supplied content for. The idea Direct Create brought was reuse rather than new work, Monsoon Rumal imagery from the Jal Mahal Archives, the same archive underlying the Jal Mahal book and the original restoration, released to the production partner MELA for that one celebration. What it taught the practice is a discipline as much as a lesson. One cultural asset, properly held, can travel across a restoration record, a monograph, and a wedding facade without losing its provenance.
Publication and platform
Three publication efforts, on three different scales, ask what happens when Direct Create’s own thinking becomes the deliverable rather than a client’s interior. The Jal Mahal book, running from its commissioning in 2020 to an April 2024 delivery and a March 2025 launch, argued that a restoration only becomes culturally legible to a wide audience once it exists as a published object, beyond the rebuilt lake alone. Future of Tradition, the practice’s own Substack, opened on 24 August 2024 with no client and no commissioning party, and carried seventeen essays by September 2025, running the Culture Code framework, the Three-Sphere Framework, and the Yamuna restoration argument through public essay form before any of them reached a client deck. Its Jaipur Dialogues workshop, convened at SUM House across 30 January to 1 February 2025, extended a line that runs back to RISD’s INDIA_SENSED Winter Session, a four-week global travel course Direct Create hosted in Jaipur in January 2023 with four named master artisans, Padmashri R. K. Derawala, Badshah Mian, Neelum Narang, and Jayshree Kumavat, and that later resurfaced as Joy Ko’s own published account of the 2025 dialogues. What the three together taught the practice is that an advisory practice needs a publishing surface of its own, because the intelligence it produces inside client work does not otherwise accumulate as a public record that peers, students, and future clients can read.
What the work keeps teaching
A monument and its water are one object. The Jal Mahal’s restoration could not be read apart from the Mansagar lake around it, and that lesson, made explicit across two decades of work, reappears by name in Birla Niyaara’s “Heritage Pond Is Raw Gold” argument and again at continental scale in Future of Tradition’s essay on the Yamuna’s own catchment.
The substrate runs beneath the surface. Gurgaon reads as a cultural void only until Sector 71’s research locates the Haryanvi village underneath its towers. Alila Fort Coorg’s forest resort conceals a Kodava world of clan structure and sacred groves. BITS Pilani’s campus carried a century-old proportional logic no living architect could name until Direct Create decoded it. Restoration framing, in every case, means surfacing what a place already holds rather than inventing what it lacks.
Plurality is the Indian argument. Fabindia’s “custodian of the many Indias,” the Swadesh Bazaar’s seventy-nine-entry craft list refusing a single regional voice, and the practice’s own Future of Tradition essays on India’s more than seven hundred craft techniques each resist the same temptation, to compress a subcontinent’s specificity into one exportable style.
Craft is a language and a technology. Future of Tradition’s Culture Code essays count Panja weaving’s two hundred thousand possible variations and Bandhani’s sixty thousand, the same combinatorial argument Brij Foundry’s artisans make when they describe Tal Patachitra as a two-thousand-year-old technology rather than a decorative inheritance. The practice now treats every craft brief as an encounter with a working system rather than a museum object.
A commissioned object is a portable repertory rather than single-client property. The Bhadohi carpet Direct Create made for Broadway Malyan traveled unchanged into Coforge and IIT BHU’s Brahma AI Lab three months later. The Monsoon Rumal archive from the Jal Mahal restoration has carried across a book, a restoration record, and a wedding facade. The practice’s own intellectual property, once made, keeps working.
Research precedes specification, every time. Taj Puri’s twelve-category Odisha craft map, the Central Vista Diversity Gallery’s two-hundred-object reference archive, and the BITS Pilani measurement pass before any framework was written, all insist that the cultural map is a research deliverable produced before a single artwork or material is specified. It is not an afterthought applied to a finished design.
The advisory boundary holds under real pressure. At the New Parliament, working across an architectural firm, a ministry, and an artisan ecosystem simultaneously, Direct Create set its scope down from the first work order, because the boundary is hardest to hold where the stakes are highest, and it held.
Ideas in development
Beyond the engagements above, Direct Create is developing a body of independent research and speculative frameworks, on craft as a combinatorial language, on restoration methods that scale from a single lake to a river catchment, and on how digital tools can extend an artisan practice without replacing it. A dedicated ideas section, drawing on this research rather than on any named client relationship, is being built and will carry that work forward on its own terms.
The advisory boundary
Across every engagement, the practice holds the advisory-implementation boundary. The Culture Stack informs the work; the design team, the architect, or the artisan workshop authors the spatial, material, or woven outcome. At the New Parliament, HCP’s own architecture held the building; Direct Create’s decorative direction was explicitly named an aesthetic layer over it. At Taj Puri and Alila Fort Coorg, the interior and landscape teams hold spatial execution while Direct Create holds the cultural argument beside them rather than beneath them. At the Dadar Edit and the Brahma AI Lab, master artisans translated the cultural narrative into the loom and the tufting frame; Direct Create held the producer role for the commission without ever becoming the studio’s interior designer. The line is written into the practice’s scope from the start of an engagement.
How to commission work
Engagements begin with scoping. The practice and the client agree on the project’s governing question, the audience, the constraints, and the deliverable shape, before any fieldwork begins. The fee structure is phased against the stages of the work, with the largest weight on argument and edition. The default deliverable is a study, delivered as a deck that reads as a narrative of chapters and exhibits. The study is the start of the work. It is not the end; the Commentary continues as long as the designer is reading from it.
To open a conversation, write to rajeev@directcreate.com.
